OK, we’re at the Gungahlin Digital Hub and we are about
to take a tour of the National Museum of Australia.
If you could open your laptops we’ll get started.
Today the students are taking a virtual tour
of the National Museum of Australia with the CSIRO virtual Museum Robot.
Hello and welcome to the National Museum of Australia …
The Museum Robot here is a telepresence
platform that allows remote visitors from all over Australia
to dial into the Museum and get a virtual tour of the Museum’s
exhibits and be able to see the exhibits in the gallery
in a panoramic sense and be able to access all sorts of extra information.
The robot knows exactly where it is at any one time
to within about one or two centimetres,
and we can send the robot to anywhere in the gallery
that the visitors want to see.
We’re now here at Phar Lap’s heart.
It’s a little bit gruesome…
You can look around the entire room,
the immediate area that the robot’s in by moving the camera around.
The Museum robot’s main piece of technology is the panoramic
camera which is on the top.
You can rotate your own camera so you
can look at whatever you like and if there’s something you are
interested in looking at you can click on it
and get more information that way.
... and in various ways, they demonstrate ...
In addition to that we’ve got a second camera here
which is always trained on the guide from the Museum who can talk
directly to the people in towns across Australia.
So high speed broadband is critical in this application
because the 360 degree field of view camera has a lot of data in it.
It’s a video camera and there’s a huge amount
of data needs to be streamed live to each student.
There’s all sorts of interactive features that are built in to this as well.
They can click on certain objects that they can see
in the camera and they’ll get extra information… …
Which can be letters, diaries, photos and all sorts of other information.
You can look at other stuff around where the robot is and click on it,
it comes up with a little slideshow where you could read the exhibit panels,
it’s like actually being there.
They can also interact with the guide by asking him questions
and the guide can ask them questions and respond as well.
I see we have a question from Jayden?
Hi Jayden.
How ya going?
Hi, I’m good. I just wanted to know who the people behind you were.
Ah, that’s a great question.
We’ve got two giant puppets here…
And we can make sure that we’re satisfying their curiosities, meeting their
learning needs and engaging them in a face to face way.
The tour was really informative. It’s almost like you are actually there.
High speed broadband will enable students
who live in regional and rural areas access to information
and to places that they may not have been able to access before.
I think students from all over Australia, not just those in Canberra,
would have a really great time with this because they
might not be able to come down and visit the Museum but with this
virtual tour it gives them the opportunity to
practically go there and experience a lot.
Being a teacher with fifteen years experience I can say this new technology
will revolutionise the way we take students out on field trips
and in fact will change the whole concept really of an excursion.
My favourite part was probably Phar Lap’s heart.
He explains a lot about the different stages of Phar Lap’s life.
Here’s a multiple choice question for all of you on the tour…
They can ask you questions.
So it could be a multiple choice question or a yes or no question…
And most of them are right, you’ve come through
with the correct answer which is 300 grams…
Before we had high speed broadband we just couldn’t dream of these sorts of projects.
Well, we’ve come to the end of our virtual tour
of the Landmarks Gallery of the National Museum of Australia,
I hope you keep in contact…
We can now see there’s a whole new
raft of applications that we can start to think about …
I hope you’re going to go away and do a little bit of research on …
And some of them we just even don’t know what they
are yet, and we’re sure we’ll find out very soon.
And we’ll catch you later.
Bye bye.