i-factory

The "Ships, Cable Cars and Tourism" section of the Swiss Museum of Transport houses a permanent exhibition called "i-factory — understanding informatics". The basic principles of informatics are communicated visually and playfully over an area of 375 m². The building blocks of IT are made transparent and surprising connections are established with everyday IT applications. iart has planned and realised the various media used to communicate information in the exhibition: four multiuser/multitouch media tables with a tailor-made interface design, a film wall composed of 48 screens, an "i-quiz", a so-called "data check" to evaluate the visit and to compare it to other visitors' activities and a play figure corresponding to the virtual "i-friend".

Equipped with their personal play figure, visitors obtain access to all the interactive stations in the exhibition and to a virtual "i-friend", who guides them through the exhibition and via the Internet even when they are at home. He explains the rules of the game to them, asks questions and enables contact with other "i-friends".

The foot of every play figure is equipped with an individual fiduciary marker, an image that serves to identify the personal play figure and that permits the collection of personalised data: the length of stay, play results and the frequency of clicks are, for example, registered and used to evaluate an anonymous visitor profile. At the exhibition's "Data Check Station", visitors can view their personal data and compare it to the anonymous data of other visitors. If visitors store their personal data, they can retrieve it later on the i-factory Internet portal. At the same station, visitors can have their photograph taken with their "i-friend" and can save the photograph.

The four themed islands relating to the most important principles of informatics (sort and search, plan and control, programme and code, try and retry) contain not only various analogue games but also a 70″ multimedia table each.

The innovation of the i-factory media table is the combination of functions, which has never before been found on a media table of this size: not only can several visitors play simultaneously (multiuser), but its entire surface is interactive and can be activated by means of both finger and fiducial tracking.

This project was realised in collaboration with tegoro solutions (since 2013 part of iart).