Member Showcase: Flaming Pear
Project: The Interactive Dive Cage
Client: Oceanarium, The Bournemouth Aquarium
Outline Brief
To create an interactive experience for visitors to this premiere aquarium on the south coast.
The installation had to produce the following: a ‘wow’ factor, 10 minute dwell time, educational content, fun content, something for all ages to engage with, individual and shared experiences and, overall, a ‘big idea’ which would capture the imagination of the press community, creating additional marketing reach and encouraging new visitors. On top of this there was a fixed budget available and the only space in the venue we could work with was a relatively small square room.
Outline Work
Our Creative Director, Marian Emmett sketched a concept of filling this square room with a metal cage as if it was a shark diving cage. We thought it was a great idea to explore our subject matter – creatures which were too large/impractical to ever house in the aquarium itself. We wanted people to experience the excitement and unpredictability of seeing large creatures swim up to them, so rather than a menu system we created a randomized loop of these amazing creatures swimming up to and around the cage. When the hero creatures appear (Great White Shark, Bottlenosed Dolphin and Manta Ray) a button pops up encouraging people to reach out and touch to find out more about them. Using this technique a visitor or family can claim 1 wall of the cage as their own and in ‘Interactive Mode’ they use a menu system to interact with games, videos and animations about that one creature. The other 2 walls remain in what we call ‘Screensaver Mode’ until someone else comes along. We then created a shared experience to draw in a larger audience. ‘Show Mode’ takes all 3 walls of the cage to present a 4 minute journey through a Blue Whale!
Unique Features
We spent a lot of time creating really high-end CG animation sequences. We wanted to retain the highest quality so we used fully rendered images rather than real-time 3D playback. This allowed us to do stunning multi-layered composites of water, light, particles, fogging and the creatures themselves. We then add real-time graphics over these rendered sequences to deal with the truly interactive elements such as the text, photos, game characters etc.
By far the biggest challenge was how to pull this off from a technology point of view. There are 12 x 50” plasmas running at high resolution. The 3 modes demand that these run as a unit of 12 or sub-units of 4 or 8. All this required an entirely new piece of software to enable us to control such huge amounts of video, animation and interactivity with flexibility. Everyone assumes we have some super-computer hidden away under the cage but actually we realised to make this stable, flexible and scalable we needed to use several computers to pull it off. Consequently there are 13 PCs (1 per screen plus a server which also controls sound and physical lighting). The software we designed, called “Omni”, allows us to plug in extra units so if someone asked us to create a 100 metre virtual fish tank, elephant enclosure, space ship window or whatever, then we can scale the solution up or down. So we’re very proud of the technological achievement. It has to be said though, that as an interactive design agency the
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