Ubiquity is currently in pre-production with its mobile museum guide, slated for an April 2005 opening at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA). The project represents one of the first permanent installations of a multimedia handheld guide in a museum space.

The Ubiquity handheld will be made available to the public next spring, providing museum visitors with personalized, location-aware, rich media interpretation as they make their way through the galleries. Towering totem poles, monumental carvings, feast dishes, and fragments of Northwest Coast dwellings and artifacts will be augmented by a combination of expert commentary, video, graphics, text, and animation, all delivered to visitors’ personal screens.

The Ubiquity system utilizes location-sensing technologies to match rich media interpretation to the visitor’s location in the museum. Individuals will be able to supplement their visit with the contextualizing media most relevant to them. As the handheld guides are wirelessly networked to a central server, media viewed on the portable devices can be bookmarked and easily accessed for 'second look' viewing on larger screens, either at the museum or at home on the Internet.

The comprehensive visitor studies conducted by Ubiquity in Spring 2004 supported the use of a handheld multimedia guide as an excellent tool for enhanced exploration and lifelong learning. Users of the prototype consistently referred to the effectiveness of the handheld in bringing the visitor closer to the objects on display, in a profound and resonant way.

The Ubiquity handheld at the Museum of Anthropology is being produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada, Administrator of the Canada New Media Fund, funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage

“This small screen device opens out to a wide world of stories…and entrusts the user with a challenging invitation to learn and explore. It opens the museum-going experience to new possibilities for innovative forms of collaboration and discussion among visitors”.

Elizabeth Ellsworth, Author of Places of Learning: Media, Architecture and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2004), on the Ubiquity handheld.