The Story, an exhibition that explores the history of County Durham and its people, opened in Spring 2024. AY-PE were commissioned to create the digital media for this exhibition by designers Mather & Co, interpreting collections, records and objects that span thousands of years of everyday life. AY-PE delivered a large suite of digital media, including many interactives. I developed some of these, with the rest being outsourced due to time constraints.

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‘Community Festivals’ is a dual 4K screen interactive, one touch, one non-touch, giving visitors an opportunity to add a customised person or vehicle to an animated parade. The touch screen is set lower, and the non-touch parade screen is set above. The parade screen shows a constant animation of crowds, and people walking and cycling in a parade that celebrates five themes: Midsummer, Agriculture, Pride, Miners, and Regiments. Visitors use the touch screen to select any of the five parade types, and then any of four options within each parade, such as confetti, fireworks, flags, carpets, rosette, airplane banner, food produce, cake, drummers. Options can be customised with a range of different colours and then added to the parade, where they join the animated characters on the screen above. Confetti and fireworks turn the parade scene dark before exploding into colour across the screen. I created these using Unity's Visual Effect Graph. The environment is further brought to life by use of key sound effects and background animations such as trains. The text and photo content in this interactive is client updateable, and is loaded from a remote Craft CMS server.

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‘Dressing Up’ provides a life size interactive experience to explore some of the key people from the region via their clothes and costumes. Using a huge 4K portrait touch screen, visitors start by having a photo taken of their face. Following some guidance on where to stand, there is a countdown to the photo being taken. The photo is placed into a cut out on an historical costume, which is separated into three distinct parts: legwear, torso and headwear. There are ten different people and costumes to explore, visitors can swipe through each of the three parts separately to mix and match different costumes. The onscreen controls can be moved up and down, and left or right in order to accommodate visitors of different heights, especially useful on such a large portrait screen. When any of the parts are from the same costume, the relevant controls turn green. When all three parts are matching, the costume is complete and a ‘time travel’ button appears, allowing visitors to find out more about that particular person or costume. The text and photo content in this interactive is client updateable, and is loaded from a remote Craft CMS server.

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‘Aycliffe Angels’ is a video player triggered by visitors using a physical ‘clocking in’ card to start one of five videos. Each tells a story about the Aycliffe Angels, the women who worked in the munitions factory in Newton Aycliffe during World War Two.

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‘Around the World’ is an interactive visual prototype that I created for a larger interactive. It uses Unity's HDRP to show a rotatable model of the Earth, and as parts of the Earth rotate through the day / night terminator, the landmass changes to show city lights being illuminated or turning off. Due to time constraints on the project, the development of the full interactive was outsourced, but uses my prototype as the starting point.

Credits

Simon Kendrew: Software development

AY-PE: UI Design, Installation photos.

Mather & Co: Installation photos

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