The National Museum of the Royal Navy Case Study
Overview
Portsmouth Historic Dockyard brings together a number of visitor attractions,
including historic ships and even submarines that the public can climb aboard.
The National Museum of the Royal Navy stands in the thick of the action,
educating people of all ages about life on the water.
This year it opened a new £4.5m set of galleries, which recount the
remarkable experiences of more than 1,000 servicemen and women in the
Royal Navy over the last 100 years.
Brief
DJW was briefed to install the AV hardware throughout the new HMS Hear
My Story exhibition. The solution needed to be highly interactive to engage
visitors with the exhibits on show.
Solution
With the focus of the exhibition being on personal stories, DJW’s solution
centred around hands-on, interactive exhibits which allowed visitors to
connect with the people behind the tales.
An example is the soundscape DJW created within a mock up of a ship’s
sleeping quarters. Visitors can climb into the bottom of a triple bunk bed,
triggering an audio scene that plays out shouting from further down the
corridor and other noise sailors would have heard while drifting off into
slumber.
A further example comes in the form of the many large touchscreens, where
visitors can manoeuvre models of the individual ships that took part in
different naval operations over the last century.
Interactives were fundamental to the user experience and DJW’s team of five
AV experts, who worked over just three months on the project, installed a
minesweeper game where visitors could detect and dispose of mines.
Those behind the museum wanted visitors to interact, not just physically with
the artifacts on show, but to interact mentally with questions and issues raised
by their visit to the galleries. Cone speakers and 55 inch monitors were used
to pose ‘thought-provoking’ questions to those passing by, such as: ‘whether
women should continue to serve on submarines’ and ‘whether the navy
should have more funding’.
Visitors can vote on these issues, and a tally then displays the results of the
vote from that day.
Other interactive tools installed by DJW include listening posts, an immersive
theatre and various touchscreen and button-triggered displays. In total, the
new exhibition features 37 video displays (of which 12 are touchscreens), 23
various size monitors, 2 video projectors, 24 digital replay units, 15
computers, 47 audio listening devices and 38 press buttons.
The new exhibition is housed within a refurbished naval storehouse, which
has been restored and named the Babcock Galleries.
Outcome
Matthew Sheldon, project director, said: 'Through the exhibitions, we are now
able to tell the undiscovered stories from the ordinary men, women and ships
which have shaped the Royal Navy's astonishing history over the century of
greatest change.
“Housed in the country's most significant naval storehouse from the Georgian
period, the state-of-the-art AV interactive displays and exhibitions installed by
DJW bring the collections alive and into the 21st century for everyone to
discover.”
Contract value
£175,000
Kit list
On request
Images
Journalists can download images direct from
http://mediacentre.kallaway.co.uk/national-museum-of-the-royal-navy.htm