Alaskan tide pool animals and reptiles from the lower 48 states share an eclectic gallery space focusing on life sciences at the Imaginarium Discovery Center at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. The challenge here was to create an exhibit that allows visitors to learn more about these diverse animals in a cooperative and interactive way.
Rather than develop separate kiosk exhibits for each group of animals, Ideum worked with the Imaginarium and Ansel Associates to create an collaborative comparison tool that lets visitors explore the similarities and differences between animals. Visitors can compare a variety of traits, everything from diet and lifespan to size and weight to exhibited behaviors and more.
Visitors can drop images of various animals into an interactive “comparison wheel” to see how any two animals compare. The comparison wheel, along with the images, can be rotated 360 degrees, making the exhibit completely omni-directional. Up to four people can interact on the multitouch table simultaneously.
The exhibit software was developed with Adobe Flash and the GestureWorks multitouch framework for Flash. The application uses an XML structure which allows all the content details to remain external to the application and thus easily changed.
The Animal Comparison exhibit is part of the Imaginarium Discovery Center which opens to the public on May 22, 2010. You can learn more about the project on the Imaginarium website and on the Ansel Associates site.
