Audioguides & Apps
Tour de Force
In our latest apps and audioguides round-up, an inventive mobile experience scores points at the Hunger Games exhibition and Google Glass brings a Velázquez retrospective into focus
Mobile Experience
The Hunger Games: The Exhibition
Location: Discovery Times Square, New York
Design: Acoustiguide
The Hunger Games: The Exhibition opened in July in New York’s Discovery Times Square, and Acoustiguide helped bring the attraction to life with an integrated mobile experience.
Acoustiguide worked with Lionsgate and partners Imagine Exhibitions and Thinkwell Group.
The mobile experience is designed to immerse visitors in Panem, the world of the Hunger Games movies. (The fourth and final instalment, Mockingjay Part 2, opens on 20 November.)
Acoustiguide wrote and produced the audio content and designed and developed the mobile experience for the exhibition. When users access the app, they follow heroine Katniss Everdeen on a journey packed with multimedia features designed to enhance the experience. Users can customise and share their journey, photos and “achievement badges” on social media. Features and hidden content include deleted movie scenes, interactives, AR and location-aware beacon technology.
Google Glass
Velázquez
Location: Grand Palais, Paris
Design: Acoustiguide
A recent Diego Velázquez exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, has been exploring the use of Google Glass as a museum guide.
Visitors were able to discover the works of the Spanish painter through a range of audiovisual and multimedia add-ons available via Google Glass. Those included video, music, images and special commentaries.
Acoustiguide especially worked on creating a fluid and uninterrupted viewing experience for the visitor, ensuring looking from the Google Glass screen to the artwork was as seamless as possible. The software developer was GuidiGo.
“A major advantage of the glasses is that you can look at the painting and simultaneously view or listen to audiovisual content, without this hindering viewing the picture,” says Agnès Alfandari, Acoustiguide’s vice president of digital strategy. “The glasses are simple to use and so light you forget you’re wearing them, which enables you to concentrate on the artwork while you are shown its most interesting details.”
Audioguide
Tchaikovsky and Peace
Location: Museum of P Tchaikovsky and Moscow, Moscow
Design: Dataton
In the year of composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 175th birthday, Dataton PICKUP audioguides created a musical soundtrack to complement a Moscow exhibition. Tchaikovsky and Peace – at the Museum of P Tchaikovsky and Moscow in Moscow, Russia – presents over 500 artefacts put together thanks to loans from other institutions. Each room features a themed soundtrack with personalised sound from Dataton PICKUP, supplied by Russian AV solutions partner INTmedia.
The audio tour brings together a selection of material from the museum’s rich biographical and musicological libraries, combining music and narration to create a unique immersive atmosphere for visitors. Visitors can move freely around the exhibition, triggering soundtracks by pointing and clicking at discreet microtags, or transponders, mounted in each room. The audio tour is available in both English and Russian.
Audioguides
Panorama Mesdag
Location: Panorama Mesdag, The Hague
Design: Guide ID
Panorama Mesdag is a cyclindrical painting housed in a purpose-built museum of the same name. The museum, in The Hague, the Netherlands, in June started using Guide ID’s Podcatcher platform and new audio tour, which teaches visitors about Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s unique work. The tour is available in 20 languages.
Audioguides
Koninck Experience
Location: Koninck City Brewery, Antwerp
Design: Guide ID
The Koninck Brewery in Antwerp, Belgium, is set to launch its interactive tour experience in September. Billed as informative, exciting and fun, the tour features multimedia and audiovisual effects to tell the story of the brewery and Belgian beer. It’s available on Guide ID’s Podcatcher platform in four languages.
Audioguides
Bus and Boat Tours
Location: Tours & Tickets, Amsterdam
Design: Imagineear
Imagineear has created audio content for Dutch company Tours & Tickets, who offer bus tours and canal cruises in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands and Belgium. Imagineear was asked to create audioguides for bus and boat tours in Amsterdam, meaning it had to consider different routes and tourists’ different viewing perspectives of attractions and points of interest. The digital agency built right and left versions to cater for both directions of travel. The audio content was produced on a small budget in 14 weeks. Imagineear scripted and produced over 70 hours of audio in 18 languages.
