The Aircraft Factory at Brooklands Museum opened in 2018, and is all about aircraft design and manufacturing. The exhibition contains a wealth of digital media, both passive and interactive, and I developed the touch screen interactives.

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'Design It' is an aircraft building game that challenges players to create the perfect aircraft for a specified task. It is presented on two different installations, one for civil aircraft and the other for military aircraft, with each installation having three different challenges. Players advance through five stages in each challenge, making choices on fuselage, construction materials, wings, engines, crew numbers and armaments. Players must keep an eye on how their choices affect the aircraft's speed, passenger capacity, range, weight, and combat rating. There are hundreds of different possible build combinations. When the aircraft is fully assembled, players can compare their choices with the ideal choices, and see how well they did.

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'Future Aircraft' is a six screen, three PC networked installation, that lets visitors learn about future aircraft technologies that are currently in development, and also then build their own aircraft and launch it on a display wall. Two touch screens allow one or two visitors to each explore the technologies and build their own aircraft. Building an aircraft means making choices about power source, the role of the aircraft, whether it is piloted or a drone, top speed and altitude, materials used and the type and size of airport it can land at. The final stage in the build process is for the visitor to customise the aircraft with their name, home town and a colour. The aircraft is then launched, after which it will appear on a large, four screen video wall in front of both touch screens. The aircraft will fly around the environment on the display for the remainder of that day. The touch screen interactives log the total number of choices made for each stage of the build process, so that visitors and museum staff can easily see the popular (and unpopular) choices by other visitors.

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'Principles of Flight' is a simple touch screen video player interactive, with a menu that allows visitors to explore the four key principles: lift, weight, thrust and drag.

Credits

Simon Kendrew: Software development

AY-PE: Concept, UI design, installation photos.

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Developed while employed as Senior Software Developer at AY-PE.