This permanent exhibition at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm tells the story about the conditions in China before it was China, how people lived and what they made in Eastern Asia for thousands of years before no one even had thought of a Middle Kingdom.
The heart of the exhibition is a collection of world-renowned painted pottery from the period before China. A fundamental idea behind the exhibition is to mediate an experience of the life at that time and to make the people who created the pottery come alive to the audience.
This is realized using a computer controlled interaction and media system using three types of media, sound, light and video. Eighth video projectors are projected a seamless image on a whole wall, animating a yellow river. The light system in the main display case can be animated and make the visitor focus on certain pots and group of pots. The sounds are environmental sounds that creates atmosphere and narrative voices in form of two children.
The exhibition is completely automated and the audience can interact with the exhibition by different means. Motion detectors are used to start and stop the exhibition depending on the activity of any audience. The drawers in the red cabinet are sensitive so when a visitor is pulling a drawer he/she starts a sound that is associated with some of the object in the cabinet, for instance the recorded sound of one of the rattler. The night is a small room within the exhibition room. Enter the room and you will take part of longer stories told by the children. The room is equipped with a 3D-sound system to create a spatial experience based on sound.
The installation is a computer-controlled interaction and a media system consisting of 22 sensors; three touch screens, eleven magnetic reeds and eight motion detectors of the same kind used for burglary alarms. The system (except video-wall) is running on a single computer with the software (developed by the Interactive Institute) based on the MIEL interaction language. In MIEL the interaction author can set up rules describing a particular situation when a media event should be triggered, and it’s performing the event by it self or by delegating it to some external device. MIEL can handle the animation of the light and can communicate with external devices such as media players. The computer get all information from the 22 sensors, based on this information it creates a reaction. All audio comes from a computer-based audio-player, developed by The Interactive Institute. The audio-player handles all 32 loudspeakers in the installation, each loudspeaker can be controlled separate and any audio clip can be played on any loudspeaker. This is a very cheap and yet reliable method for distributing sound in installations. Other comparable technologies for sound distribution will cost several times more that this solution. The video-wall is based on the commercials system Watchout by Dataton and is running on 9 computers and 8 video projectors.
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Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm