These days museums have large parts of their collection locked away in huge archives.
The Fashion Museum of Antwerp (MoMu) transforms this problem in one of their strengths by digitally unlocking their hidden treasures to the public.
The interactive wall was initiated by Studio Dos Santos. Under his guidance MoMu assigned Lab101 to set up a team to work on the concept, creative and technical challenges. To reach a large audience the wall was installed outside the museum which makes it accessible during closing hours

Featured in a nice article on Vogue.
Check the making of to see how we solved some of the challenges involved in this type of setup.

From past experiences we learned to focus on quick and explorative interactions. Designing these kind of experiences involves a new way of designing. Instead of outputting a number of static design files, Beyond.io and Neuroproductions worked close on a number of interactive prototypes. These software prototypes were tested on Holocubes hardware prototype creating an constant feedback loop for the people at MoMu.

The setup runs from a single computer rendering 8xHD at a resolution of 7680x2160 at 60fps spanning an area of 10m².
To archieve this high speed rendering we created two seperated OpenGL contexts for each graphic card (AMD W7000) and offcourse used a lot of threads to do all the slow image and data loading. We also used a Linux server where a Node.js CMS did most of the preprocessing of text,images and video.
Using a DXT convertor for video preprocessing and phantom.js to render text compositions to image files.

More than 1000 collection items or available and accessible by a interesting collection of tags and relations. This limited but straightforward way of exploring makes the exploration effortless and fun for the public.

As it's an semi-outdoor setup we couldn't rely on popular optical touch technology but had to experiment with capacative touch. Multiple capactive foils or very sensitive for interference from their neighbour foils and other hardware. Therefore we put a lot of effort and research in minimizing the noise on the different panels. With succes we eliminated more than 90% of the initial noise.

All the capactive foils gave us a maximum of 80 simultanious touches. Which is more than enough for the physical area.