Elevating Interactivity

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex recently opened at the end of 2008 in Soho New York (right around the corner from our office : )  Its brings to NYC a little bit of the Cleveland Rock & Roll Hall of Fame experience but compressed into about 3,000 square feet with a lot less noise.  Audio bleed is a big issue when designing interactive, multimedia experiences within physical venues. This problem is compounded when all of your content has loud rock and roll music associated with it.  Without the music the experience is incomplete but with it can be deafening to contend with for 2 hours (imagine what the staff must feel like). There are several elements of this experience that are worthy of discussion but the aspect that caught my attention was the solution to their audio problem, a location aware, personal audio player that allows visitors to enjoy the treasure trove of music at their own pass. 
The system is from Sennheiser and its called GuidePort. The equipment consists of a headphone connected to an MP3 Player which all visitors are given as they enter the exhibition (notice the headphones on the visitors in the below rendering).

The receivers are intelligent enough to read trigger zones within the space which tells the audio source to change to the associated track matching the artifact or video clip you’re in front of.  Technically this immersive experience works very well, allowing the audio to fade in and out as visitor’s progress through the space. Each visitor has control of their audio level so it’s never too loud for any one visitor.  For the exhibit developer there are some timing challenges to make sure all the video content is synced with its associated audio but once you lock that down it never drifts. 

The one negative I experienced, which is inherent in this solution, is all of the visitors are functioning in their own “virtual world” closed off from their family and friends. This isolation cuts down on personal interaction reducing any collective experience that would take place as you chat about what you are enjoying. To solve this issue I would encourage Sennheiser to develop a “press to talk” feature that allows visitors within groups to leave audio comments (think of it as a post it note voice mail message) that is bookmarked to its related trigger zone. This would enable visitors to interact with each other as they leave notes along the way that are retrievable by others who are interested in a dialog.