A playful experience for a dusty museum

Digital Design voor Erfgoed Gelderland

In short:

We’ve made a game that both engaged the target audience to learn and see the depot objects.

There was no room for all depot objects about the river Walloon to display to the public. So we’ve made a prototype that both engaged the target audience to learn and see the depot objects.

The Waalpaal, roughly translated to: “Walloon Pole”, is a modern, playful and educational arcade-machine designed for the Valkhof Museum. This arcade-machine offers the Valkhof Museum an opportunity to display the forgotten depot objects (which are collecting dust at this very moment) to their visitors. Not only is this educational, it’s a fun game as well.

The concept:

Each Waalpaal progressed the individual journey a visitor made within the Valkhof Museum. The journey itself is simple. A storytelling experience with fun games in between. Like pop quizzes, puzzles and mazes.

The story:

It starts with a giant, called: Vahalis, who’ve created the Walloon according to legend. Vahalis is angry, because of the forgotten, dusty depot objects that are stored in the museum’s cellar. That’s why he’s flooding the river and putting all the villages near this river in danger. You, the visitor are helping the villages by finding these depot object in the mazes and answering all the questions about these objects in the pop quizzes.

The interactive part:

To make these Waalpalen (Walloon Poles) durable, we’ve chosen to limit tangible visitor’s experience. In short: The user doesn’t even need tot touch a Waalpaal. The visitor interacts through a Leap Motion, a small device that can register a user’s hand motion – which works quite accurate. With this device the user can roll the ball which is used to navigate the mazes.

“This is makes the boring tour enjoyable. It’s actually fun to go to a museum now.”

The effects:

By using the Waalpaal there’s an increase in engagement with the objects. The history and stories of the objects explained themselves by playing the game. Our target audience could easily navigate through the levels of the game, had a blast playing the game and remembered information of the various depot objects by creating a small learning curve throughout the levels.

“This is makes the boring tour enjoyable.” one of the kids said. “It’s actually fun to go to a museum now.”

Our concept won the second place in the Stellar Strategy at the ICA-awards in 2016. The Valkhof Museum and Erfgoed Gelderland were looking into our ideas and were very excited about the idea. No implementation (yet).