Output equipment: how the exhibition speaks to a person

Laser instead of a lamp: 20,000 hours without a change, instant start, mounts upside down if it has to. Lamp models are no longer specified for new exhibitions — not because they throw less light, but because someone has to change the lamp, and there is nobody to do it.

Sits right against the surface and throws the image at almost a right angle. A person can walk up to the wall without blocking the frame with their own body — which is the whole point.

Throws onto a translucent screen from behind. The viewer sees a glowing surface, never the machine or the beam, and casts no shadow — however many people crowd in.

Not a device but a technique: the image is computed for the geometry of a model, a façade or a product. Needs an accurate model and blended projectors — in return the volume is real, not drawn.

A module is a tile with its own LEDs, power and board. They build into a canvas of any shape, and a broken tile is replaced one tile at a time. One question is settled before purchase: is there half a metre behind for servicing, or must the modules come out from the front.

The same LEDs on a rubber backing: the canvas wraps a column, lies over a vault, follows the wave of a wall. Where a flat panel would leave a seam, this gives one continuous surface.

Ready-made LED spheres, cylinders, cubes and rings. The image wraps the whole form, so the object works for people circling it and reads the same from a balcony and from below.

Modules hang on winches and change position through the show: the screen parts, gathers, becomes a wave. Image and movement are one score — you cannot reproduce it with a video.

The industrial relative of a television: round-the-clock operation, portrait mounting, remote management, years without being switched off. A consumer TV in an exhibition lasts until its first summer.

The image hangs on glass and the exhibit shows through. The original stays original while cutaways, labels and animation lie over it as a layer. Switch it off and only glass remains.

The picture from a screen reflects in a semi-transparent film and appears to hang in mid-air. Nineteenth-century theatre knew this trick, and it is still the most dependable of the «holograms» — there is nothing in it to break.

A strip of LEDs turns fast enough that the eye assembles the trail into a whole image hanging in the air. Installed in an hour, gangs into a wall — that is how the big «floating» objects are made.

The screen emits dozens of viewpoints at once: the eyes see different things and the object turns as you move your head. Sizes are still modest and the price matches — but this is real volume, not an illusion.

An optical raster on an ordinary panel gives each eye its own pixels. Cheaper and larger than light-field; you pay in the narrow zone where the effect holds.

The headset closes off the world: a person ends up where they physically cannot be. One person at a time experiences it — and the whole schedule is counted from that number.

A tablet or phone shows the camera feed with what the room does not contain laid over it: a building completed, a mechanism running, a character. Cheap in hardware, expensive in content.

Sound confined to a narrow zone: the visitor at the exhibit hears the story, a neighbour a metre away hears nothing, and nobody needs headphones. It cures the chief affliction of multimedia exhibitions — ten exhibits talking at once and none of them audible.

Sources placed around the room give sound direction and distance: a footstep on the left, a rumble overhead, a voice from one point. Half the sense of presence is made here, not on the screen.

From a classic audio guide to streaming audio to the visitor's phone. The only way to deliver a long text, several languages and different depths from one and the same exhibit.

Shakers in floors and benches, fans, heat, scent. Pennies next to screens, and it works disproportionately hard: the body remembers before the head does.

Light in an exhibition does not illuminate, it narrates: singles out, extinguishes, leads, sets the rhythm. It runs on the same cues as everything else at a fraction of any screen.

Actuators and mechanisms: a model opens out, a machine rotates, a cutaway parts. A different order of impression — the object is real, and it reads from the far end of the hall.

The display draws power only while the image changes and reads like paper — at any angle, with nothing glowing into anyone's face. It cures an old museum ache: new attribution and a new language on the caption.

A swarm holds formation to a computed programme and draws three-dimensional figures in the air. The only way to get a picture hundreds of metres across with no structure at all — in many places it has already replaced fireworks: quieter, cleaner, repeatable.