3Design and Flightless Collect and Connect
In 2015, 3Design had the privilege of working with an awesome company called Flightless. Flightless is a boutique design and independent games development studio that developed the concept, design and production of a multi-user interactive table game for the Taku Tāmaki Auckland Stories Exhibition. 3Design modelled over eighty pieces for the Collect and Connect game which is an example of a physical-digital museum experience at the leading edge of creative technologies. It cleverly brings together a combination of approaches in infrared camera tracking and multi-touch screen hardware, 3D printed and printed solutions, data-driven and client-managed content and a modern game's engine development platform.
We worked closely with the Auckland War Memorial Museum team to develop a multi-user, physical-digital interactive experience for a nine-to-12-year-old target audience. The final solution was a treasure hunt-like game where visitors were tasked with being ‘curators’ to hunt down objects related to a particular topic. Through the use of written clues, colour coding and iconography, visitors moved around the table using their own physical game piece as their main interaction. This piece took the form of an abstract Sherlock Holmes-like, 3D printed model. The models had tracking markers on their undersides which were tracked via infrared cameras mounted on the table screen hardware. User interface displays and abstract styled game graphics reacted with these models as the visitor moved around the table utilising a front-facing radar scope to see otherwise hidden moving objects. Additionally, the visitors could use a separate set of physical museum ‘department’ models to help them find the object they were after.
The overall premise of the game was to find the correct set of objects as fast as you could to get a daily time rank. However, the endpoint of each game enabled the visitor to interact with the objects they had collected. Each object was an actual record of something held within the museum’s digital collection, so there were an associated image and written description that went with the object. While the game is an abstract, fun and collaborative free-for-all, conceptually the underlying theme introduces visitors to the way museums collect, curate and view data.
Client: Auckland War Memorial Museum
