While debating how to name our newest SocialScreen product, we threw dozens of names into the proverbial hat. This hat started to resemble one of Magritte’s dour derbies as the names became more and more surreal. I won’t list them here but suffice it to say, each struggled to capture the sense of wonder this new interactive wall product creates in its users.

Of course, being children of a certain generation, we were avoiding the inevitable “WonderWall.” In our lifetimes, there have been at least two other “wonder walls” – the late 60s film by Joe Massot (with a soundtrack by then Beatle George Harrison no less) and Oasis, Beatle wannabes, whose mid-90s tune references it.

Urban Dictionary has three definitions that range from an object of obsession to: “A barrier which separates the mundane from the Transcendent Reality. A true Wonderwall will always have…an opening which allows anyone a glimpse of what lies beyond.”

For our purposes, this definition has a lot of appeal though we like to think of the Snibbe Interactive WonderWall™ is less a barrier and more of a door to the imagination. The WonderWall invites visitors to move and manipulate customized virtual objects in a an interactive experience unlike anything else. For Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, a space-themed WonderWall features a virtual telescopic lens that peers into deep space, space-walking astronauts, and the Mars Rover you build yourself. Each exhibit engages both visitors’ minds and bodies as they maneuver the inviting animations on screen.

With Snibbe Interactive’s WonderWall,the customization possibilities are endless, though all are bound to be fun and physical and sure to inspire, yep, wonder.

With Avatar, director James Cameron built the most immersive virtual world that has ever been created on-screen. Now, Snibbe Interactive brings the futuristic technology and alien ecology to life in Avatar: The Exhibition at Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum – open through September 2012. The exhibition is about as true-blue a fan can get without body paint.

Using Snibbe Interactive’s SocialScreen platform, visitors are invited to wade into Pandora’s ecology and mingle with simulated woodsprites. In the exhibit, luminescent floating jellyfish-like creatures glide through a high definition projection of the planet’s verdant forest. The glowing woodsprites descend upon visitor’s shadows when they remain still, and skitter away when visitors move suddenly, just like the magical creatures in the movie.

During the production of Avatar, director James Cameron used a “virtual camera” to move within and capture Pandora’s three-dimensional landscape. Snibbe Interactive recreated this process with a Virtual Camera exhibit in which visitors can become a director, creating their own unique version of scenes created with the identical 3-D material the production’s visual artists created for the film.

Similarly, SocialStage replicates the real-time “performance capture” of Avatar’s actors. When you step into SocialStage’s glowing room and begin to shake your blue booty, it’s not merely a Na’vi simulacrum – it’s the same 3D models in which actors Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana injected their creative energies. It’s the same digital DNA, making your Avatar and theirs digital half-siblings.

Snibbe Interactive’s multi-touch display, the SocialTable Touch, provides an intuitive interface to showcase trivia, images, video and other ephemera behind the Avatar experience. It’s like a Na’vi-sized iPad! Drop special shapes onto the table and rings of material spin out, allowing you to endlessly explore the concept art and alien ecology created to make Pandora feel so real.

Duck and cover.

The early days of interactive exhibits are littered with heartbreak and a fair amount of shattered glass. Consider Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp who is often credited with creating one of the first interactive installations with his breakthrough (um, literally) Rotary Glass Plates installation.

“Rotary Glass Plates is a motorized device that demonstrates the continuity of visual impressions,” explains the exhibit notes at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, where the interactive installation is currently on display. “Its five glass blades are painted so that when set in motion and viewed head-on, the machine forms concentric circles on a single plane.”

The work required the viewer to activate the machine and observe it, straight on, one meter away – hence, the purported interactivity. For 1920, this was cutting edge – in more ways than one. Duchamp’s pal, photographer Man Ray, intended to capture the experiment, however, when they turned it on a belt broke and snagged a piece of the glass that went glancing off the photographer’s forehead. Fortunately, it shattered only when it hit the floor.

Though we applaud Duchamp’s early efforts at creating an interactive experience, be assured, Snibbe Interactive’s Social Screen won’t raise your museum’s insurance premium. The only moving parts are your visitors themselves as they dance, interact and generally cavort in a virtual environment that’s a window into the imagination sans the glass. Sure, Duchamp might say “no pane no gain” but we say an interactive museum installation shouldn’t require one to duck to be interactive.

The recent release of Microsoft’s Kinect* has raised the profile of our time-tested 3D tracking interfaces. To support the demand for full 3d sensing, Snibbe Interactive has now adapted all of its large SocialScreen interactive wall products to work on the LCD Display of our SocialMirror platform. To get started, just plug it into an outlet and the system auto-calibrates and runs within moments, requiring no special background behind visitors.

In an exciting development, as of the beginning of 2011, all or our systems now support the Kinect Camera in addition to the industrial depth-sensing cameras we already offer. Watch the video below to see some of our most popular immersive titles running on SocialMirror with Kinect! And, even better, you can purchase these titles immediately for museum, entertainment, and marketing applications. Our shipping systems run with time-tested industrial depth-sensing cameras, and don’t need to wait for the eventual release of Microsoft’s commercial SDK sometime later this year. Of course, we’ll be excited once this license is approved by Microsoft and we can offer the Kinect as part of our suite of cameras.

*Kinect is a trademark of Microsoft

Watch the new video below for a selection from the wide range of InfoTiles interactive walls that we’ve installed for museums, entertainment, and marketing.

1) At the Guinness Museum in LA, people discover the top records of Hollywood stars.

2) Dell used InfoTiles at a tradeshow to deliver a complex message on custom software with ease and humor.

3) The College Basketball Hall of Fame uses Infotiles to explore its history.

4) Prudential used Infotiles to colorfully highlight ways of using social media.

5) The Singapore Science Center used InfoTiles to teach about penguins.

6)  Floodgate Investments highlighted its investments in Twitter and Digg.

7) The Miami Science Museum uses an expanded version of InfoTiles that asks questions about sustainability, letting people literally vote with their feet. Many more are coming your way this year!

Just on the tail of March Madness, we have a new customization of InfoTiles to share, customized with historic video and graphics from the history of college basketball. Courtesy of College Basketball Experience in Kansas City, Missouri, we were able to install this experience in Las Vegas earlier this month. Watch the video:

Also attached to the InfoTiles interactive wall is a SocialShare video email station to share videos online for viral marketing. Visitors can make, send, and post videos to social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Myspace) like the one below:

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.

We’ve just published our 2010 catalog of interactive experiences in print and PDF formats. Our products pages will always have the most up-to-date listings of our product lines, which increase monthly. However, this compact 8-page document neatly summarizes our platforms and many products and is available in print format. You can download a copy right now, or request a print copy from our office.

Customers in Entertainment, Museums and Marketing can use this catalog to order unmodified ready-to-ship experiences; or as a basis for customized and unique experiences. Don’t hesitate to contact us about your project.

We recently released the new InfoTiles product for socially browsing large amounts of information. Interaction in InfoTiles is similar to moving the game piece on a Ouija board. Using their shaodws, one or more people push a selector around above tiles appearing on a wall, floor, or table. Placing the selector on a tile makes it turn over, revealing the information below. The selector can be a frame, image, or logo.

By keeping the image on the tiles mysterious, people are encouraged to explore all of the information. In this example application for Shell, the tiles hold numbers, and people must flip over the tile to discover the number’s significance. The product combines the elusive parallel needs of communicating large amounts of information with creating a fun, social, emotional experience. Watch the video below:

This experience can be customized for walls, table, or floor. See an example concept of a floor experience with space themes below:

Over the years we’ve created a number of interactive exhibits and experiences on health. Lately, interest seems to be increasing in this area, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Games Research initiative to study interactive health game experiences for measurable medical outcomes. Several of Snibbe Interactive’s recently released social immersive experiences are being used in science museums, hospitals, and biotechnology firms to encourage good health, to educate about health, and, perhaps most interestingly, to create interactive entertainment and videogames with health themes.

A few years ago several institutions approached us asking to adapt medical gait analysis systems to a science museum audience. The problems with adapting these devices to a general audience were numerous: the systems required a high maintenance treadmill; a trained staffer needed to supervise visitors, attach markers to visitors, and operate the system; less than ten visitors could experience the exhibit per hour; and the systems exceeded exhibit budgets.

Through innovative software techniques, we adapted our core computer vision and graphics technologies to create an interactive exhibit that brings advanced athletic sports science analysis to a mainstream audience. In Walkabout, a visitor simply walks, unencumbered, across a pathway. Using computer vision techinques, a camera analyzes each person’s gait, and then places a video of her walking in place onto a nearby screen. The person can compare her unique and distinctly recognizable silhouette with that of other recent visitors. Below each walking figure, Walkabout displays automatically measured statistics showing speed, stride length, and estimated energy output (a rough equivalent to calories).

What happened next was astonishing. People began to take part in the exhibit again and again, trying not to go faster, or to have bigger strides, but to use as much energy as possible. Visitors would return to the front of the walkway and then skip, crawl, walk backwards on their hands, and perform Monty Pythoneque “Silly Walks”. You can see some of these in the prototype video (above) that we shot in our San Francisco offices. When talking to Dr. Bridget Coughlin, Deputy Chief Curator and Curator of Human Health at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, she said that this exhibit was a kind of Holy Grail for health exhibits – an exhibit about health and exercise that itself encourages people to move. Counteracting the childhood obesity epidemic in the US has become an important goal of scientists, museums, and other institutions country-wide, so creating an experience that teaches about these problems, while simultaneously and immediately counteracting them has become a goal with some urgency. There are even new terms to describe these experiences: exergames, and exergaming, the first mainstream example being Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution arcade game.

With Walkabout’s social experience in physical space, it’s still possible to link back to the virtual social world that’s now dominating life online by adding a SocialShare station to share videos online and in social networks (at the end of the prototype video earlier in this post, you can see this in action). Using a video email system, visitors can send a movie of their walks via email, and post it to Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. Now the experience is no longer constrained by the museums walls, and can travel worldwide virally and exponentially, continuing to send the same messages about exercise, sports science, and movement through social networks. Jeff Kennedy Associates added other creative add-on exercise games to Walkabout, where people can see how long their walk would take them to make a trip around a lake near the Denver Museum of Nature and Science; and another in which a visitor must correctly identify himself among several visitors.

In another less physical example, we faced the problem of creating a game about life expectancy. How could we make a fun, entertaining experience for kids about predicting the day you die? What we came up with, in cooperation with Thinc Design, was Health Choices – a tabletop interactive that goes beyond multi-touch to use six visitors’ full-body gestures for game-play and social interaction. The game goes through a series of fast-paced rounds in which retro “8 bit” icons emerge from a timer. Each round focuses on a different topic, such as exercise, education, or lifestyle. When a visitor pulls an icon into her bay, the result is immediate: increasing or decreasing a large number that indicates her new predicted lifespan. If the outcome of her choice is negative, she can push the icon away, or even into a neighbor’s bay, and choose another, like a game of musical chairs. At the end of the game, the person with the longest lifespan wins and can even enter her initials as a high score, just like an old game of Ms. Pac Man. Two postdoctoral scholars at Dr. Nancy Adler’s Health Psychology Program at UCSF gathered and formulated the research from diverse studies to ensure the statistics in Health Choices were up-to-date and consistent with current scientific research.

Finally, in searching for a way to personally connect people to anatomy, museums and health centers have been using our new Body Mirror. When a person stands in front of this exhibit, a detailed anatomical figure begins to mimic his movements in real-time. The on-screen figure can change from male to female, and highlight muscular, skeletal, nervous, or endocrine systems. Body Mirror runs on the new SocialMirror platform, which requires no special background, and a much more compact space. The system consists of an LCD screen with a specialized depth camera mounted above that can see in three dimensions. This new platform shows great promise for making a personal, physical connection to a body, because the body is a mirror of a person’s own activities, rather than an independent entity seen as separate from the viewer.

We’ve place these types of immersive health exhibits not only in science centers, but also in children’s hospitals, trade shows, community organizations, theaters, and corporate lobbies, and we’re encouraged by the positive response. We strongly believe it’s possible to mix health education with entertainment and gaming to make educational experiences that compete favorably with video games for people’s attention and engagement. Our dream is to create rich, “Fantastic Voyage“-like experiences in which people use their whole bodies with each other to explore the mysteries of our bodies – imagine working together to physically block a virus from entering a cell as a way of educating about infectious diseases. Imagine a physical video game that both kids and adults rush to play in their spare time, that, as a side effect, teaches them all about microbiology, health, and the body, and gives them a workout!

Scott Snibbe