Vaga Lume

During my studies at Les Gobelins we had the opportunity to work with the Petit Palais museum to propose ways to improve the visiting experience. The museum houses the fine arts collection of the city of Paris and is situated inside a building build for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Its administration was looking for ways to get visitors interested not only in the works of art but also in the building.

My team designed an audioguide to help visitors pay attention to the building's features and get information on its design and construction. The guide is meant to represent a box containing a "piece of memory" from someone's visit of the building on its inauguration day. Wandering around the museum, visitors will automatically start audio clips of this memory, each clip being a conversation between the fictional person and a character involved in the building's design or construction. Characters include, among others, the architect, a painter, a mason and a politician who oversaw the design.

In concrete terms it is a box containing an mp3 module, a speaker, animated lights and a wireless communication module (we used standard radio frequency communication). All of it is controlled by an Arduino board. The lights are animated to give a "living" feel to the box, and to blink when the characters are speaking. All of the hardware is contained in a central "tower" for easy access and maintenance of the audioguide.

As a bonus, when visitors finish the visit the box pushes out a facsimile of an Exposition Universelle ticket, printed on seed paper, for them to bring home as a souvenir.