Interactive equipment

A screen, a model or a vitrine tells nobody anything on its own. We build the equipment around the story, not the story around the equipment.

“Museum equipment” is usually searched by someone who already has a budget line and a deadline to produce a list of items. The honest answer: equipment is chosen last. Not because it does not matter, but because until the story is written there is no way to say which equipment is the right one.

Multimedia hardware tells nothing by itself. A touch table without content worth digging into is an expensive tablet on legs that people stop approaching within a month. A projector without a scenario is a bright patch on a wall. The difference between a museum with a queue at an exhibit and a museum whose screens have been off since last year is not the brand of the hardware.

What gets decided before the hardware

1. What the visitor should walk out with. Without that answer every line in the specification is a guess.
2. Who comes: a school group, a family on a Sunday, a specialist, an official delegation. Different pace, different height, different patience — and those are already technical requirements.
3. Where the visitor stands and for how long. An exhibit people pass on the way to the cloakroom and an exhibit people sit down at for five minutes are different machines.
4. How many people at once. One touch screen for a group of thirty means twenty-nine of them are looking at someone's back.
5. What is actually shown. Content is the largest and most underestimated part of the budget: models, filming, texts, voice-over, animation.
6. Who maintains it. Museums rarely have an engineer on staff. Anything that cannot be restarted with one button does not survive into its second year.

What exists, and what each type is actually good at

• Touch tables and panels — for content worth digging through: maps, archives, drawings, biographies. Poor under crowd flow, almost useless for a group.
• Projection onto a physical model — when there is a form to work with: a territory, a building, a plant, a field. Stronger than any screen, because the volume is real rather than drawn.
• Large screens and video walls — for overall impression and as a gathering point for a group. Not for reading: nobody reads long text off them.
• Holographic showcases and volumetric displays — when the object cannot be shipped, cannot be cut open, or does not physically exist.
• Touchless interfaces — gesture, proximity, sensors. The exhibit comes alive by itself, with no “press here” label, and it is the only way to reach visitors who are shy about touching things.
• Augmented reality on a museum tablet or the visitor's own phone — cheaper in hardware, more expensive in content, and it needs someone to explain how to start.
• VR — a strong impression for exactly one person and a queue for everyone else. Calculate throughput before the purchase, not after.

What “modern” actually means

A museum is not modern because of the manufacturing year of its hardware or the size of its diagonal. An exhibit is modern when it is understood without instructions. Five seconds for a child to work out what to do. Five minutes for a specialist to find the depth they came for. The same object serves both. If it takes reading a rules plate to start, the object gets redesigned — however new the hardware underneath it is.

How we choose the equipment

We start from the effect we want, not from a particular technology. First we settle what the visitor should walk out with, and only then what to build it from. We are tied to no manufacturer and sell nothing off our own shelf, so the solution is picked for the job rather than for what is familiar or already in stock. Supply is handled by our partners: any equipment, on the best terms for the client. Our part is the story, the content, the interaction, the software and the integration — we build complex hardware-and-software systems and answer for the whole of it working as one thing, not as a pile of boxes from different vendors.

What drives the cost

• Volume of content. It multiplies by the number of scenarios, not the number of screens: ten panels running one scenario cost less than three running different ones.
• Whether source material exists — collections, drawings, 3D, footage — or has to be created.
• A one-off delivery, or a system the museum keeps filling itself afterwards.
• Room conditions: light, ceiling height, access to services, and whether drilling the walls is allowed at all.

• 115 installations in a single exhibition — Cosmonautics and Aviation Centre, VDNH
• 2011 studio founded, working worldwide
• 3 wks our fastest interactive project delivered end to end

If the budget is already broken down into line items but there is no scenario underneath it, that is still fixable — as long as the supply contract is unsigned. Send us the list: we will say what is redundant, what is missing, and what will not survive the first year. Free, and it takes one conversation.

Equipment library: 65 types, what each one does and who makes it →

How many people saw it

• 7,000 delegates over three days
  Proryv
• 200,000+ downloads of the AR Moscow City app
  Panorama 360
• 2M visitors in eight months
  Russian Industry

Projects where we have done this

• Cosmonautics and Aviation Center — An exhibition of 115 touchscreens · VDNH
• Proryv — Rosatom · the presentation tunnel
• Panorama 360 — Mobile guide in augmented reality
• Russian Industry — Interactive installations · Russia Expo

Frequently asked questions