Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) asked Stimulant to conceive, design, and build an anchor interactive wall for their new Bezos Center for Innovation. The exhibit investigates Seattle’s history as a key center for innovation, and MOHAI wanted an interactive touch wall that would act as a coda to the experience, inspiring visitors to be innovative in their own lives and communities.
A museum visitor’s moves are matched by the gestural interface when approaching from a distance.
We designed a gestural interface that literally reflected the user in the exhibit, underscoring that anyone can be innovative if they simply cultivate certain habits of mind. We did this by creating a reactive mirror, augmented by an array of depth-sensing cameras, that followed visitors’ movements with playful, spritely particles. The experience attracts attention and invites closer inspection.
A child interacts with an exercise on the museum’s touch wall.
Once within arm’s length of the museum touch wall, the interface instantly transforms into a touch-driven experience that provided a series of activities. These activities serve to remind visitors that innovative thinking is within everyone’s reach. The system adaptively displays interface elements based on the user’s actual height, allowing for high usability across an incredibly broad demographic of museum-goers. When a child approaches, the interface is displayed at their height, and several feet higher for an adult. The experience walks visitors through several interactive exercises that explain some of the key traits of innovators, such as persistence and “connecting the dots.” The importance of collaboration is illustrated by spawning two buttons that need to be touched at the same time, but are too far apart to be touched by one person alone. This requires finding another visitor and coordinating with them to touch the buttons simultaneously on the museum’s interactive wall.
Museum of History and Industry
