Today I was indexing some papers from the first (1991) ICHIM conference, as we prepared for ICHIM07 (the tenth of these meetings) in Toronto this fall. 1991 was the year the Gopher protocol first appeared, and there was, of course, no web. Yet it was fascinating to return to these papers at http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim_91.html to discover how much of what we assume some days is new, is actually quite persistent since the birth of interactive multimedia.

Dennis Tsichritzis and Simon Gibbs (University of Geneva) described a prototype 3-D virtual reality environment for displaying museum artifacts and discussed the advantages this would have in future high bandwidth network environments.

Kathy Wilson (Bank Street College) reported on a formative evaluation of the Museum Educational Consortium’s discovery-based learning prototype of Palenque, engaging visitors in research that would be exemplary if conducted today.

Kristina Woolsey and Rob Semper (Apple and Exploratorium) discussed the intersection of multimedia and public space, arguing for group experiences and contributed content, take home media and installation designs that augment the on-site visit.

David K. Allison and Tom Gwaltney (Smithsonian National Museum of American History) reported how over 1.5 million visitors to their history of information technology exhibit tracked their progress ” through 20 different exhibit station using 400,000 barcoded “brochures that allowed them to build personalized visit records, bookmarking their favorite places for later off-line review and gave the SI researchers a degree of insight into visitor behavior within the exhibit that others are still trying to replicate.

In separate papers, Larry Friedlander (Stanford), Myron Krueger (Artificial Reality Corporation) and Peter Lewis (British Golf Museum) reported on full body interactives in which visitors acted Shakespearean roles vis-à-vis great actors from the past, played virtual volley ball on a court set up in the ICHIM hotel, and used a CD-I to play a round of golf on famous courses worldwide, presaging gestural interfaces and the Nintendo Wii.

And, in their papers on the meaning of images across cultures (Chantal Cornuejois and Kathryn A. Murphy-Judy, Carnegie Mellon University) and visual thesauri (Matthew Hogan, Corinne Jorgensen, Peter Jorgensen, Syracuse university) raised issues that still bedevil us, and proposed promising approaches to them that have yet to be fully exploited.

The proceedings reaffirm what I remember from those exciting early days of interactive multimedia – though we were stuck with videodisc and cd-i, rarely had any usable bandwidth for remote access, and our visitors had little experience with the novel “windows” interfaces to say nothing of images, sound and video mixed with text, people were thinking hard about the uses of these media and reaching far in their implementations. The scale of some of these projects – RAMA, the Smithsonian IT history exhibit, the Museum Educational Consortium – still amazes me. In the decades since, we’ve seen lots of new technologies, but no new paradigm about how to use them. We won’t see that, I think, until we learn to use location-aware wireless communications to turn the museum inside out, bringing cultural heritage and scientific interpretation out of the museum to people wherever they are.