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The Art of Wireless.

Article Excerpt
By Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief

Testing ensures museum visitors enjoy a rich multimedia experience.

Los Angeles, CA--A new wireless LAN system installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) enhances visitors' experiences while supporting museum staff. Currently, the system delivers multimedia content to visitors equipped with museum-issued PDAs (personal digital assistants), it provides museum staff members with wireless connectivity to the museum's wired network, and it serves as a WiFi hotspot to visitors who bring their own laptops to the museum campus.

Ultimately, the system may support wireless ticket and member-card scanners, enable VoIP communications among museum staff members equipped with mobile handsets, and provide RFID capability for controlling the museum collection, which numbers more than 100,000 objects.

The current and envisioned uses of the wireless-LAN capability entail various types of data traffic with widely varying quality-of-service requirements for factors such as allocated data rate, total bandwidth, jitter, and latency. And because the museum's wireless LAN connects visitors and staff while providing connectivity to the museum's wired network, security is a concern as well. Before choosing and

installing its wireless LAN, LACMA performed extensive testing to ensure security while being able to provide the traffic-handling capability necessary to provide a positive user experience to museum visitors and staff members.

Why wireless?

The impetus to install a campus-wide wireless network occurred in 2003 when LACMA undertook to build the Broad Contemporary Art Museum within its campus. "We had been looking at wireless technology for several years, but it wasn't really mature enough for us in this particular environment," said Peter Bodell, LACMA's CIO, during an interview at the museum campus in January. "We had implemented some wireless capability in some areas, but it wasn't necessarily viewed as a campus-wide project. But when the museum said, 'yes, we are going ahead with the Broad building,' it was the ideal opportunity to build out a campus-wide wireless system that would connect to our existing infrastructure."

Bodell noted that, "Traditionally, museums have audio tours and paper-based content, so we stepped up and said, 'alright, we need to go to the next level--we need to get it to multimedia.' So, we investigated a grant opportunity with the Irvine Foundation, which we were successful in securing. The grant provided funds for us to deploy PDAs within the museum and to develop content for them. In concert with that, we looked at wireless systems from a standpoint of, 'OK, what's best for us at the moment, and what can we foresee in the future?'"

With an estimate of current and future needs, the museum developed an...