Interactive Experience Research

Great Ormond Street’s Interactive Animal Wall

"positive experience for the children and their family"

"interactive artwork that responds to activity on a paitients journey"

"very accessible to everybody" (considering different age group)

"true moment of distraction and fascination" 

"thermal consideration, and how light shines through the wall paper"

"encourages children to learn"

"magical effect"

The Nature Trail installation extends across 50 meters length of corridor to achieve a calming and attractive route to surgery. The installation has interactive and illuminated forest and foliage wallpaper that features animals like horses, rabbits and hedgehogs. When the sensors in the celing sense movement below, it brings the animals to life.

I'm quite interested in the way they laid out the wall paper, making it very accessible to everybody (inclusive). People on wheelchairs or children will be able to respond to the work as well as other people who may be taller. The nature aspect of the experience lets people learn how animals interact and move which will be a useful tool for my project as i'm also focusing on an animal. Also thinking of including sound which may draw people in from different parts of the museum. It will be interesting for Te Papa's audience to see how the Moa actually moves. (The current diagrams in the museum is a little outdated in terms of how the Moa stands and carries itself). 

The current display: Neck is too straight.

The neck is supposedly arched like an Emus.

To an artificial mind, all reality is virtual.
Noisy skeleton is an immersive and interactive installation that explores the link between sound, space and artificial intelligence.
From complete control to accidental reaction, the spectactor is completly surrounded by abstracts visuals and digital soundscape echoed back by the machine.
Establishing a real man/machine dialogue, the minimalistic aesthetic and vibrations create a both virtual and physical experience, permitting the user to feel the most subtle variation of sound and space.

I'm quite interested in interactive installations working with sounds and movement.

Using gesture motion/control to trigger Moa sounds would be quite interesting and interactive.  

Nervous Structure is an interactive installation created by emerging artists Annica Cuppetelli (USA) and Cristobal Mendoza (Venezuela). The work is composed of hundreds of vertical elastic lines illuminated with interactive computer graphics that react to the presence and motion of viewers. A significant aspect of the installation is the moiré pattern, which is created when the projected lines move over the structure. A moiré pattern is the optical result of two overlapping grids that are not in perfect alignment. 

The emergence of new technologies such as OLEDS is causing a dramatic change in lighting.

the installation allowed visitors to experience the lighting concept, which reacts to people’s 

movement.

HALO is an interactive art piece for the people of Christchurch. Participants are asked to search for an envelope corresponding with the first letter of their name and respond to the message they find inside and then re-attach it to the structure. The artwork is suspended from a donut shaped structure consisting of helium balloons trapped inside a netting tube. The Halo glows brightly with a LED light attached to every envelope and piece of art. The simplistic nature of the design creates an approachable environment for people of all ages, from children to adults. Our aim is to create a space which will transform over the night.

SPHERICAL SOUNDS will be a chill-out area full of relaxing blue light with smaller bean-bag like spheres on the ground for seating. We are introducing the sound of the Tui, a common New Zealand bird, to bring in a quality of nature. Drops of a sheer fabric will represent the percussive sounds of the Tui and act to frame the bar. Loud speakers will replay a loop of recorded Tui song underlaying chill lounge music. At the completion of the event, we would like to donate our spheres to local preschools so they can continue to have fun with them.

Source: http://studiochristchurch.soapsites.creative.auckland.ac.nz/category/design-courses/

New Delhi Audiograph
An interactive, audiovisual installation by Paweł Janicki, the work treats some elements of the Hindi language as a structural foundation of a musical composition. New Delhi Audiograph uses a motion tracking system that enables the audience to interact with the piece. By various moves and gestures, the interactor can modulate and control various parameters of the music and image generated by the installation.

Source: https://cycling74.com/project/new-delhi-audiograph/#.VfZS4ngwyfQ

Already midway through a $350 million-dollar expansion, the Cleveland Museum of Art was challenged to grow new audiences. Tasked to utilize technology, but not diminish the traditional gallery experience, media design firm Local Projects created a suite of new “interactives” that transform the art museum experience. Another priority was to incorporate the learning objectives and specific content of individual installations without losing sight of the overall visitor experience. It’s a serious challenge to balance learning, contextual understanding and fun.

One not only absorb the art surrounding them, but also make their own works of art, understanding creativity by being creative.

Source: https://bitevisual.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/cleveland-museum-of-art-interactive-exhibits/

Assignment 2

Awesome Forces

When:

Long-term exhibition

Where:

Level 2

Cost:

Free

Type:

Nature; Family 

New Zealand is a young and active land, from a geologist’s point of view. Awesome Forces shows how plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and erosion have shaped one of the most dynamic landscapes in the world.

Starting with a model of the Earth’s interior, the exhibition explains the forces that change the surface of the globe. It shows New Zealand’s position astride two mighty tectonic plates, and explains how the movement of the plates is measured.

A video describes New Zealand’s split from the supercontinent Gondwanaland 85 million years ago. It also presents geological evidence that the ancestors of New Zealand's unique fauna and flora may have travelled on the New Zealand 'continent' when it split from Gondwanaland. These biological treasures, both living and extinct, include the flightless moa, the tuatara – a dinosaur-age reptile – insects such as wētā, and giant land snails.

New Zealand's seismic activity and volcanic eruptions, and their effects on people and the land, are brought to life through large screen projections, animations, a shake-house simulating an earthquake, and interactives including a seismic station. The effects of rainfall and extreme weather events – by-products of New Zealand's unique location – are also demonstrated.

Objects I might be interested in:

Moa

Blood Earth Fire

When:

Long-term exhibition

Where:

Level 3

Cost:

Free entry

Type:

Nature; Family; People and history

Blood Earth Fire will take the audience on an extraordinary journey of discovery through the changing landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand. The changes have been dramatic and are dramatically presented. They will be confronted by the mass of ‘alien’ species that humans brought to this land.

Audience can explore the teeming communities of plants and animals that existed here shortly before people arrived. Meet the stout-legged moa, the adzebill, and the laughing owl while listening to how the dawn chorus of a thousand years ago may have sounded. 

Objects I might be interested in:

The stout-legged moa, Euryapteryx geranoides, was a mid-sized bird at home in forest fringes and scrublands. A considerable amount of fossilised remains of stout-legged moa exist due to the good preservation properties of their habitat and the frequency with which they turn up in Maori middens.

This gave exhibition researchers for Blood, Earth, Fire – Whangai, Whenua, Ahi Kaand model makers of the stout-legged moa plenty to work with when reconstructing the species. The approach they took was essentially a forensic reconstruction. Every bone of the moa was studied in detail, for articulation (the way the bones fit together) and for muscle attachment.

Studying the way the bones would have articulated allowed researchers to look at the birds’ posture. It turns out that moa did not stand tall like an ostrich – the way they are most often pictured. Instead, they were long, with their heads and necks reaching out directly in front of their bodies. This ‘hunchback’ posture meant moa could not have browsed the tops of trees as was previously thought, but fed on undergrowth.

Looking at where the muscles once attached to the bones, researchers could get an idea of how stocky the bird was. This stout-legged moa species was surprisingly heavily built – much more so than the other species we know about. From new genetic analysis, researchers also know that the females weighed about twice as much as males, making them very big ‘girls’ indeed.

The model makers also took incredible care with the face, first measuring the fragile skulls in Te Papa’s collection room and then recreating them in plasticine (modelling clay). Once this step was finished, they went back to their workshop and began the painstaking process of ‘fleshing out’ the model with more plasticine where muscles would have been on the head. 

The skin texture was modelled either by taking impressions from mummified moa (in the case of the feet) or by referring back to the moa’s closest living relatives, the cassowary and emu. 

Te Papa is fortunate enough to have some moa feathers in its collection, probably over a thousand years old. From these, the model makers were able to dye emu feathers to give them the right look before carefully applying them to the finished model.

Resources: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/WhatsOn/exhibitions/Pages/AwesomeForces.aspx

Refined Screenshots (Final)

Rationale

Upon entrance to Te Papa, the visitors will get issued a tablet with a pre-installed app that will be used throughout their journey to enhance their Te Papa’s experience. They will also have an option to get issued headphones to listen to the audio that plays throughout different sections of the app. The main feature of this app uses augmented reality and ibeacon to make way finding in a museum a more innovative and interactive experience. The app is not downloadable on outside devices making it exclusively unique to Te Papa.

My allocated persona was family so I wanted to cater to both parents and children allowing a child mode and a parent mode that will be the default. The photo feed uploaded by Te Papa’s visitors allows the family to easily pick and build their tour according to their interest saving valuable time. These photos are constantly updated every week to ensure visitors are able to keep up with the latest and most popular exhibits.

The augmented reality map forms a track that easily guides the user to their exhibit. There is also audio playing as it guides you, which is optional for the user if they use their headphones. There are also certain touch points throughout the exhibit that lets the visitors take photos with augmented reality creatures displayed in Te Papa. Animals that were once extinct will come to life through your camera and the audience will be able to hear the sounds they make and see movement.

On child mode, an I Spy narrative game encourages kids to look and engage with the displays for a longer amount of time. iBeacon is used here to sense these objects, making the screen glow either blue or red to indicate how far the object is. Kids will need to use this app to help guide them around the exhibition and will have to take a photo of the object once they have found it. Linking back to the photo feed, the family has the option to share these photos which are all saved in a gallery on the app.