feel comfortable with the process of downloading and installing those apps. Striking the right balance
‘The trend is very much towards immersive
experiences’ David Willrich, DJ Willrich
are museums that already have their own apps to enhance your visit, and this is a trend that will continue without question.” Magri notes the challenge
of developing apps to run on multiple types of mobile phone platform – and the fact that not all visitors will
between a shared, communal experience on the one hand and a personal, individual one on the other is the key to success. Many in the industry point out the importance of not using a technology just for its own sake, but of making it serve a well- identified purpose. As Corrado wryly points out: “Clever designers know that technology is a good slave but a poor master.” The same thinking that applies to mobile phones should also be applied to other forms of interactivity. It is also, as Jeffreys points out, important to remember that the visitor attraction experience needs to be one that is not easily obtainable in the home. “Touchscreens are just a commodity now,” he says. “They’re nothing special any more. It’s more about turning surfaces such as tables, floors, walls and so on into interactive displays. It’s about using proximity and 3D
sensing to trigger and create content and responses.” “Another area that has
seen rapid development and an increase in use, is digital image processing and various flavours of augmented reality,” notes Sarner’s Magri. “There is now on the market a host of technologies and processors that allow you to manipulate a video image or create one that changes in real time – for an outlay that only a few years ago was too prohibitive to consider for the average projects.”
“In the meantime, but not specific to any one technology, the transition to digital has been an ongoing process,” he continues. “Strangely enough, the use of analogue technology still forms a major part of any AV install. However, the switch to digital will eventually ensure that all components within an installation operate at the digital level, although the cost is still too high for many of the installations.” It becomes clear that the
AV industry is providing some seductive technology – and in the search for something
novel, different and compelling, the visitor attractions industry is responding to that seduction. The technology can be (and is) occasionally misused, implemented for its own sake rather than to serve an identified purpose – but that’s hardly the fault of the AV industry. And for every failure, there are many more successes. Most of all, the visitor attractions business is an ideas business – and AV technology is helping make those ideas a reality. If it is indeed true, as at least one commentator believes, that
consumers would rather economise on clothing than entertainment, there will always be a market for quality attractions, regardless of the state of the economy.
DJ Willrich installed a whole host of AV technology in the Titanic Experience. See Installation June for more
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