National Museum of Natural History: Digital Interactive Upgrade
Overview
In tech, “out with the old, in with the new” is a constant cycle, but sometimes it’s worth keeping good content with a solid retrofit. The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), located in Washington D.C., engaged Interactive Knowledge (IK) to help upgrade digital interactive displays designed for the Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals. The digital interactive displays help visitors, particularly younger visitors, to engage with the exhibit and enhance learning as they explore African animals. From learning about the changing Sahara, hunting for prey or avoiding predators in the Savannah, or practicing your “hunting like a bat” skills, visitors use the digital interactive displays to see these animals in a new way.
About this project
NMNH engaged IK to work on the “Hippos,” “Prey,” “Predators,” and “Hunt Like a Bat” digital interactive displays. They were originally built using Adobe Flash software platform. After Adobe announced Flash’s End-of-Life in 2020 the content could no longer be supported and needed to be updated. The interactive digital displays were unresponsive, diminishing the experience for visitors. However, the original interactive designs fit the exhibit and the NMNH wanted to retain the content and the current display instead of doing a complete overhaul of the exhibit.
The project goals
IK was tasked with transitioning the NMNH content to a current platform. The best software environment available is the modern web browser using HTML and JavaScript. It means the interactives can still operate in a browser environment and their new lifespans aren’t limited to the support of a single company. NMNH needed the upgraded content to fit within the current display design. When the interactives were originally released the 4:3 aspect ratio monitor was a more common screen in computing. Today 16:9 is the wider standard so we had to decide if the original aspect ratio should be preserved or if expanding the content was appropriate. Furthermore modern screens can have higher pixel density which may distort some of the older assets in the old interactive software. So we had to consider each asset and how it might look on newer hardware components.
The IK approach
Upgrading old content can be surprisingly challenging from a technical perspective. Even though Adobe Flash is a well-understood technology much of the “magic” is the power it has to animate content. Some of these animations are nearly impossible to replicate without pain-staking coding which probably takes many times longer than the original designer took to implement in Flash. Using well-placed and highly produced video recordings IK is able to replicate the exact animation and place into the new interactive. This perfectly preserves the “feel” of the original interactives.
For animations we could not replicate with video, like those which respond to touch or dynamic events we utilize libraries like GSAP which give IK developers as much control as possible of the assets in the interactives.
The results
The NMNH was able to seamlessly install the upgraded digital interactives into the Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals, allowing visitors to access the interactives and improving their visit. IK helped the NMNH to utilize the value already invested in the exhibit by retaining content that had merit but needed an upgrade.
