Te Papa
Aim Wellington
23rdSeptember, 2008

Te Papa museum in Wellington has a goal to preserve and present the taonga (treasures) of the New Zealand people. The museum attempts to interpret the heritage of New Zealand for national and international audiences, by helping establish New Zealand’s place in the world through contextualising their heritage within the heritage of other cultures.

Te Papa’s this month launched an exciting new addition and multimedia experience called Our Space. The goal was to create an interactive exhibition where the visitor could create and experience their vision of New Zealand via new, state-of-the-art interactive displays. Visitors could come along with the opportunity to mix it, own it, and share a piece of New Zealand history. Interactive features included the opportunity to walk on The Map and trigger New Zealand into action. Get the adrenalin pumping with The High Ride and log onto The Wall and leave your mark on a giant artistic interface.

Aim Proximity on seeing these Interactive displays wanted to be involved and came up with an idea called ‘Get into Our Space’. Basically it was an idea to get New Zealanders to experience and start the Our Space exhibition before you even got near the museum. We wanted to do this by putting your into historical New Zealand scenes and allows them to save and share those space images with friends and family.

To promote the idea and web site we decided to put ‘green screen’ bus shelters around Wellington, which allowed people walking past to take a photo of themselves using their mobile phone. By sending this image taken to a number shown, you would receive your photo back showing you in a totally different yet historically familiar space.

Users could upload an image to the official website, where they could then put themselves into one of a number of NZ historical scenes. We basically attempted to turn visual static history into something that you can interact with.

We also developed an iPhone application to support the web site and promote the event. On downloading the application to your iPhone you could select photos from your photo library or take a new one using the in built camera. You then could select one of the historical Our Space images and morph yourself into the scene.

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