Some potential tools to display information on an iPad at an art gallery/small museum:
- iPadPortfolioApp.com — and ipadportfolioapp.com/howto — they have a lock down feature so patrons to the art gallery can’t edit/change anything on the iPad
- InDesign:
“Use interactive PDFs with hyperlinks to achieve an app-like behaviour. We created the presentation with all buttons and target pages in Adobe InDesign CS5 and exported the whole thing as an interactive PDF.” (From https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4573715)
- Keynote for the iPad – though it doesn’t look like you can lock things down; though you can have a password on a file.
- Book Creator
- In the gallery, provide an iPad on a mount/stand and link to a blog or webpage, then lock the browser. If you want to use this method to display several pages, one could build a series of webpages and insert META-HTTP-EQUIV tags in the header sections of the HTML. That tag could be used to time how long a web page was on the screen and then redirect people to another web page after a period of time.
From DSC:
The above listing doesn’t address the numerous design & development firms out there that could create an app for you.
Where I could easily see this sort of thing going is towards a machine-to-machine type of communication whereby a chip on the piece of artwork “talks” to mobile devices to bring up additional information (re: that piece of art) on the patron’s device. iBeacon-like technology comes to mind; or NFC.