Our role was to develop concepts for the interactive lounge in the new Sammy Ofer Wing of the National Maritime Museum. These concepts needed to use interactive technology to encourage people to spend time in the lounge and to explore the museum’s archival materials at their leisure.

The final concept centred around the ‘Horizon Lounge’ mimicking the ever-evolving horizon as experienced at sea. The LED lights in the lounge changed colour depending on the time of a day and featured a ticker-tape that wrapped around the walls displaying real-time sea reports. The lounge’s furniture was designed as playful but also practical so as to enable different visitors to use the space in different ways. One feature was a wall of headphone sockets that could be plugged into by visitors who could then listen to a passage from one of Nelson’s diaries about ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’ or a sailor’s account of living on The Cutty Sark.

Other installation concepts included an Augmented Reality Window that would allow visitors to virtually hold and play with naval artefacts and a multi-touch table that through touch would show how different objects in the museum were related.