Nowadays you find interactive installations on the street, in exhibitions, or even on the street. The problem with these things is that they are often very heavy, very expensive, and almost never portable. Your audience has to come to your installation. The only other way to bring interactivity to your audience is trough classic internet browsers, mobile phones or other web enabled devices. It’s difficult to submerge your audience in an interactive story, of the medium is also responsible for their Facebook, text messages and other daily activities.
Wouldn’t it be great to bring an interactive story to your audience, where the medium’s sole purpose is to tell the story, and interact with the audience ?
I finished a very nice project early in the summer of this year, that did a lot of this, and that had a lot of creative, design and technical challenges.
The main challenge was to build a portable interactive installation. For practical reasons it had to be battery-powered, and this meant all connected technology was on a power-diet. And off course the whole thing had to be a little rugged, and easy to maintain.
The main ingredient for this nerdvana cocktail was the Ultimarc I-pac controller. It offers a very crude way to simulate keyboard entries with analog switches and connections. You can go very old-school with this board, it was after all originally designed to build Arcade-consoles.
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