16 AV Installations from 2018 That AV Integration Firms Can Learn From
Museum Upgrade Takes Flight
The Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum — which displays the world’s largest collection of aircraft and spacecraft — welcomes 6.7 million visitors annually, making it the fifth-most-visited museum in the world.Museum brass turned to Corrales, N.M.-based firm for updating one of the museum’s most heavily used exhibits — a touch-interactive table that enables visitors to design, customize and launch space station modules of their own creation. The exhibit’s legacy iteration was projection based; and while it was very popular, the table was outdated and was becoming harder to maintain.
Design It! is an interactive exhibit that Ideum developed. Visitors design and build their own module for the International Space Station. The exhibit runs on an Ideum 4K UHD 84′′ Colossus multitouch table with projected capacitive touch screen.
“The Smithsonian was looking for an update of this proven exhibit. We made some minor improvements to the interface and improved the software itself, but the biggest upgrade was to move the exhibit from a projection-based, optical touch table to a highly reliable, hardened and responsive touch table,” says Ideum’s founder, Jim Spadaccini.
“We effectively rebuilt the entire exhibit from the ground-up to withstand the rigors of nearly constant use.”
