The main reason I’m in Atlanta is for the release of the Museum edition of the Horizon Report.  A couple of weeks ago we received a very exciting email, saying that the QRator project was to be included in the report!  So it was with very short notice but a big smile that tickets, flights and hotels were booked and here I am.

So yesterday the Horizon report was officially launched, you can download it here.  It is an international report about leading museum technologies, with the main aim to identify and describe emerging technologies which will have a large impact on museums over the next five years.

The 2011 edition highlights six emerging technologies or practices that are going to have an impact on the sector and breaks them down into three distinct time frames or horizons.

Here are the Technologies to watch and some of the case studies:

Near term Horizon (the next 12 months) Mobile Apps examples:

• Balboa Park’s mobile Apps
• MuseumMobile
• Getty Museums partnership with Google Googles

Near term Horizon (the next 12 months) Tablets examples:

• WaterWorx from the Powerhouse Museum
• Wikipop from the Brooklyn Museum

Mid term Horizon (2-3 years): Augmented Reality

• Browsing the Powerhouse Museum Around Sydney
• Who do you think you Really Are? from the Natural History Museum, London

Mid term Horizon (2-3 years): Electronic Publishing

• The British Library’s Turning the Pages
• Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative at the Getty

Far term Horizon (4-5 years): Digital Preservation

• CHIN’s Professional Exchange – Digitization
• The Digital Preservation Coalition

Far term Horizon (4-5 years): Smart Objects.

• QRator at University College London (yay! Us!!)
• Smart Muse at Centre Pompidou, Paris
• NFC at the Museum of London
• The Met and RFID

It is a huge achievement for QRator to be included in the report, identifying our work as a future model for the rest of the museums sector! We’re really excited about it, and cant wait to develop it further.  It’s pretty cool to think that work that is classed as in the far term horizon, we have already implemented  in the Grant Museum.  Really chuffed to bits.