Snibbe Interactive recently completed three new interactive exhibits at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry for You! The Experience. This groundbreaking exhibition creates a nonlinear social multi-user experience that mirrors the way people experience media today – through the lens of the personal, social, and online.
As the centerpiece of the exhibition, MSI commissioned Snibbe Interactive to create a twenty-four foot wide multi-projector interactive wall that accommodates dozens, and sometimes hundreds of simultaneous visitors.
The purpose of Get in the Action is simply to get people to move as if they were in an sporting class. In the center of a large screen a video coach demonstrates one of four activities: Basketball, Hip Hop Dancing, Tai Chi, and Yoga. As people follow along, magical motion effects create on-screen trails that outline their past movements, inspired by sports science analysis and visualizations similar to those that professional athletes use. These trails make the audience excited to follow along. In a free play session, people’s outlines overlap in an open-ended experience that encourages even the shyest person to dance and play with his body. Get in the Action can hold people for long durations and promotes physical exercise and social engagement.
Laugh Garden is a cluster of monitors with video faces that play on each screen. When people move in front of a monitor, the face begins to chuckle, to laugh, and eventually to roar. The greater each person’s movement, the greater the laughter. Groups of people can make the whole garden laugh together, and the laughter spreads quickly to the visitors themselves creating a social experience. The exhibit utilizes our newer depth-sensing three-dimensional SocialMirror technologies.
With Support Networks people create personalized collages about their network of friends and family. Using a touchscreen monitor, a person enters her name, which appears at the center of a large wall-mounted display. Next, the visitor enters the names of several friends. As the visitor answers questions about her social relationships, the names of people who provide more support become larger and larger. With our SocialShare add-on, the collages can be posted directly to Facebook and other social networks, or emailed to friends.
