Library of Congress Experience

This award winning interactive experience brings a 21st century engagement layer to one of our national treasures. With over 50 touch screen activities, a pre/ post and standalone web experience, a bookmarking feature called myLOC, an ARG type adventure game and a 16 foot interactive wall, this experience has interactivity turned up to 11.

At a fundamental level, most of the activities are Linear and Immersive experiences that allow visitors an increased ability to explorer architecture, literature, art and other artifacts that are normally not accessible. Through the use of high quality digital photography and classic UI techniques such as hotspot navigation, zoom in / out, pan, 3d rotate and page turning visitors can gain a deeper understand rare documents.  Second Story  does a nice job creating a visually pleasing interface that is also robust enough to serve up heaps of content with rich media functionality. 

Another element of the experience that I find effective as a starter engagement is the large Immersive projection wall that allows visitors to gain a glimpse of the content while increasing their curiosity. The wall is interactive and subtlety reacts to the visitors’ motions via IR, revealing historic document content.

There are several decisions that were made during the creation of this exhibition that I’d like to applaud. 1st the use to large 32-inch 16×9 touch screens as they universal display which is a perfect form factor for this visually rich content.  2nd the creation of myLOC  (a bar-coded passport  system that allows visitor to bookmark content for later retrieval on the web), this is something we have done in the past and feel is a natural connection between the web experiences and in gallery experiences.  3rd is the inclusion of an adventure Q&A game called Knowledge Quest which is a junior version of an ARG where visitors are asked questions pertaining to the information available within the gallery. As visitors explorer the gallery and find their answers rewards are unlocked based on progress.

A large award winning interactive agency named Schematic worked to create the website versions of the activities so visitor can experience the content and interactives entirely from home. This is not normally part of an exhibition’s focus because often they feel it reduces the need to visit the physical gallery. I appreciate this decision by the LOC to open up their content (and the actual interactives) in a way that elevates the web more on par with the gallery.  Final note…nice use of Sliverlight!

posted by eric at 5:39 PM