Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum

Giving visitors the tools to become designers immediately, without the overhead of understanding how to use new 3D or design software, was the magic of this experience. The solution is a truly innovative, incredibly easy-to-use, and intuitive user experience through a simple touch interface.

The interactive exhibit features custom hardware through large interactive touch tables with the capacity for group interactivity.  Visitors also engage using a custom RFID-enabled pen, which tracks and personalizes their interactions. 

The technology industry always has the promise of incredible hardware, such as multi-touch interactive tables. Unfortunately these technologies often don’t live up to their advertised hype. Large-scale, real-time, multi-touch capacitive interfaces were one such promise that were not consumer ready at the time this experience was proposed. Building the experience required a truly fantastic effort from an awesome team of in-house engineers (see the Creative Technologists below). The result was the very first implementation of an 84” capacitive touch table with full, real-time interaction with multiple users at the same time. Add to this a custom 3D design tool that was created specifically for this experience, and built into the exhibits!

The most evident success of the experience was not just that the technology worked seamlessly, but more that visitors did not want to stop using the touch-interactive 3D tools.

Studio: Local Projects

Director of Technology / Lead Creative Engineer: Sundar Raman

Lead Interaction Designer: Angela Chen

Creative Technologists: Oriol Ferrer, Philipp Rockel, Gal Sasson, Mike Allison, Mark Van De Korput

Project Manager: Kristen Svorka

*This is only a limited view of the team, focused on the technical implementation.