History takes a leap forward at the Tower of David

An iconic museum unleashes cutting-edge technologies to reinvent the visitor experience.

By SHAINA OPPENHEIMER
Updated: MARCH 30, 2016 18:11
Eilat Lieber, director of the Tower of David Museum. (photo credit: YUVAL)
Eilat Lieber, director of the Tower of David Museum.
(photo credit: YUVAL)
At the push of a button, one can find almost any information one wants to know.
A trip to a museum is no longer the only way to see a particular painting or learn about a certain historic site. With increased accessibility of information, museums must face the issue of how to engage viewers.
The Tower of David Museum is finding new ways to do that. In the past year they’ve been working on a series of audio and visual aids to help bring the Tower of David to life in line with the latest evolving technology and consumer culture.
Eilat Lieber, general director and chief curator at the museum, explains.
“This is the new era, you have to give the visitors the authority and tools to choose the knowledge they want to have. This is what technology is all about. There are a lot of opportunities to be part of your own experience.”
IN JANUARY 2015, the museum launched six novel products, including an AugmentiGuide, a tablet-based visual and audio mobile guide that delivers an augmented information-rich panoramic view of more than 100 of Jerusalem’s top landmarks that can be spotted from the top of the Phasael Tower. The AugmentiGuide uses an accurate mobile geospatial augmented reality solution created by Enviewz and the “Connected Views” technology is patent pending.
Together with the Augmentiguide, the augmented reality virtual reality iPad game “Swipe the Citadel” and the winning virtual tour of the Tower of David and the other digital products made the Tower of David Museum the leading museum and heritage site in Israel to offer a range of digital products to the independent traveler.
Visitors can now be their own curators and decide what specifically they want to learn about. The amalgamation of the ancient and the cutting-edge creates an interesting triangle between the visitor, the information and the technology.
“You’re taking 4,000 years of history and peeling back the layers. You as the visitor will be able to choose exactly what you want to see. If you are interested in the Roman period, then you’ll go pick a tour about that period and you’ll see what it was like in terms of dressing, in terms of architecture, and other factors.
It’s an experience only technology can make possible,” explains Eynat Sharon, the director digital media at the Tower of David Museum, who since May 2015 is the national consultant on digital media for the Israel Council of Museums.
Since it opened in 1989, the museum has been noted for exploiting avant-garde technology to tell the story of Jerusalem. Its use of holograms, diagrams, models and moving imagery soon established it in the vanguard in museum technology.
Nearly 30 years later, the museum continues to adopt the most innovative technology to pique and maintain the interest of visitors. It decided to turn to technological start-ups and offer them the Tower of David – the iconic symbol of Jerusalem – as a platform.
The shift in the museum-going culture has transformed visitors from passive observers to active participants engaging in specialized content.
“The center and core of the museum is no longer just the content. It is the visitor experience,” notes Sharon.
ON APRIL 7-8, the Tower of David will host the first museum-sponsored hackathon in Israel. The 30-hour event calls upon entrepreneurs, creators, designers and makers to come up with new forms of visitor interaction at the museum.
“We have unbelievable amounts of content in the form of archives, photographs and material about Jerusalem and Jerusalem’s history. If we can offer them all of that and they could offer us the technology, we will both be winners,” explains Caroline Shapiro, director of international public relations at the museum.
The hackathon is sponsored by a range of tech companies, including JNext, a hi-tech and entrepreneurship program within the Jerusalem Development Authority.
JNext seeks to help facilitate and encourage start-up companies to grow and prosper in Jerusalem through grants and supporting strategic events.
Helen Wexler, director of JNext, explains her interest in the hackathon.
“It’s so unique and it’s so Jerusalem. The convergence between the technology and the historic building is very exciting.”
Azrieli College of Engineering’s AtoBe Entrepreneurship Center, an incubator for start-up companies, is another sponsor of the program. Its six-month program offers academic mentorship, lab support and co-working space, and teaches companies how to make business plans and other important elements in starting a business.
Winners of the hackathon will receive a package from AtoBe Accelerator, a cash prize and the opportunity to see their work come to life in the Tower of David Museum.
Perhaps the best spot to appreciate the dynamic fusion of all the innovation at the Tower of David Museum is at the top of the Tower of Phasael. On one side of the 360º view, you see ancient Jerusalem, the backbone that sources this special city, and on the other, you see modern Jerusalem, the start-up nation.
Just as much of religion and history is rooted in and has gone forth from Jerusalem, the ideas conceived at the Tower of David Museum and the hackathon can go out to museums to extend enrichment of the museum-going experience on a global scale.
IN ANOTHER venture to foster more means of visitor engagement, the museum is working with Epson to implement glasses that use augmented reality to enable viewers to see how the Tower of David looked in years past.
Set to participate are hackers, coders, engineers and image-processing experts from every sector of Israeli society, including a group of haredi men who specialize in virtual reality, an Arabic-speaking group, and lecturers and students from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Hebrew University. Focusing on virtual and augmented reality, the event epitomizes the essence of Jerusalem in its diversity of participants and its combination of rich history and innovation.
Winners will present their ideas at a conference called Museums in the Digital Age: Enhancing the Visitor Experience, to be hosted by the Tower of David Museum on April 11. Cosponsored by the Israel Council of Museums, the event will bring experts from Israel and abroad to address issues of museums in the digital age.
The rapidly evolving technology at the Tower of David Museum speaks to the participatory culture we now live in, enabling visitors to mold and own their experience.
Hoping people will come and connect with the Tower of David Museum in new ways, Lieber sums up, “It is important for us, as the Museum of the city of Jerusalem that visitors come and engage in the stories and the peoples of Jerusalem past and present, no matter if you’re Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Jerusalem holds such prime importance in the development of much of Western civilization today and technology enables us to share content, and we hope that anyone coming to the museum should feel welcome and be able to find different aspects that connect them to the rich and colorful history of the city.”