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In a peacock's mother-of-pearl tail, precisely arranged hairline grooves reflect light of certain wavelengths. Imitating this system has been a leading approach to developing next-generation reflective displays.

I love this... I've been singing praises of nano-particles and future where printed materials shine like butterfly wings. I'll take peacock. I know displays are in--but do think there is a 'paint' element for museum exhibits to explore in future.

When 3D displays are commonplace, will the pull of real objects in museums be as strong?

An important reminder of how important the arts can be in everyone's life, and a challenge to continue finding new ways of connecting with all of our visitors.

The World Economic Forum's annual list of this year's breakthrough technologies, published today, includes "socially aware" open AI. As technology for AI assistants expands, imagine that you could walk up to a display in a museum and ask a custom AI assistant any question you like about what you are seeing. Siri and Cortana and Google Assistant and Amazon Echo try to answer questions on all topics, but what if museums and other organizations could build their own add-on packs for their sphere of knowledge? The Getty, for example, would prepare answers to every question they've ever heard about "Statue of a Victorious Youth" and museum visitors (or maybe anybody in the world) could use the add-on pack to find out what they want to know.

What is a digital badge, exactly? The MacArthur foundation says it's "a validated indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest," Students will be able to customize learning goals within the larger curricular framework, integrate continuing peer and faculty feedback about their progress toward achieving those goals, and tailor the way badges and the metadata within them are displayed to the outside world. Students won't just earn badges-they'll build them, in an act of continuous learning.

We actually were intrigued by the badges concept for the LF project and considered applying for the grant through the Digital Media & Learning Competition. But we felt we had our hands full with the project at this time - perhaps in the future?

How does this virtual Aquarium on wheels work? You connect to the truck's wifi connection on your touch-enabled smart phone. Then you can login as a male or female diver and swim around the tank full of sharks, turtles, penguins, sardines and jellyfish, all displayed on the side of the truck. When you encounter one of the creatures, you and the creature react and you win a "badge." At the end of the interaction, you can post an image of the badges you won on Facebook.

If you have any doubt that there is value in look at data visually, visit immersion.media.mit.edu to see a visual representation of your own email. Imagine this kind of network display applied to museum visitors...who is connected to whom and how often do they communicate.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

Bringing the museum concept to a community through their library. Not a new idea, but a good writeup.

What is a museum? Museums are institutions that collect rare and unique artifacts that have historic, scientific or artistic significance. Their purpose is to preserve and display these items to the public for knowledge and information. Why should you visit a museum?