The 2017 Roundup

Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to our first newsletter of 2018. It’s going to be an exciting year for Blackbox-av and we’ve already gotten stuck into some projects. But first, let’s have a look back at some of the best bits of 2017 to give a good sendoff.

Over in Edinburgh Zoo, the Tiger Tracks enclosure opened its doors for the public to learn more about their Sumatran Tigers and to give them a new home. In the Outlook Hut, we have a SoundClip-8 installed with a Through Panel Speaker and 6 buttons, which help to share information about the native home of the tigers in Sumatra and how their homes are affected by human interference. Visitors can push the buttons to head different animal sounds while they can view the tigers from a safe distance.

First, we’ve got a very recent install with the Firing Line Museum in Cardiff Castle. We were contacted by the museum to help digitise their old content, a lot of which was previously unavailable to the public. With this brief, we brought on a number standard and bespoke products to bring the museum to life and safely house the museum’s extensive archives of the history of the welsh soldier.

In collaboration with The Freelance Design Partnership, we supplied a range of bespoke interactives to the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre on behalf of Cornwall Council. The brand new centre has been developed to provide tours of the facility and educate about greener alternatives to waste management. Our bespoke interactives included a barcode scanner unit that shows how visitors’ shopping can affect the environment, a pledge station where visitors make a pledge to the computer systems and then watch as the message gets sent ‘to the clouds’ through a lighting interface and an interactive quiz using 17 Video Clip HD8 players testing the visitors’ knowledge about the wildlife and Cornwall’s surrounding areas.

Over in the Netherlands, five of our AutoPlay Single Cup Headphones have resided in the Loving Vincent exhibition at the Het Noordbrabrants Museum. Installers Mansveld oversaw the installation of the headphones, which helps to tell the story of the new film Loving Vincent and how the film was made over the course of four years. Visitors are able to use the headphones to listen to artists explain the process of painting the film’s scenes by hand and content is automatically triggered when the headphone is picked up. Magnetic hangers store them away tidily and helps to avoid any trip hazards occurring.

Transport yourself to the Sasan Gir in India and take yourself on an adventure to the Land of the Lions with London Zoo’s latest exhibit. We provided interpretation for this new zone having supplied a U-Turn for their Tiger Territory enclosure. Many of the products were of bespoke build and showcase the world that the Asiatic Lions currently live in, along with the problems that they currently face in their habitat. The new exhibit has been a huge success with visitors, with praise for the exhibit’s design and interpretive techniques.

The silvery gibbons of Curraghs Wildlife Park have recently moved into a new enclosure, and our Oversized U-Turn Panel came along to keep them company! The wildlife park has been part of a prestigious breeding programme to protect the endangered species which has been a brilliant success so far. Our U-Turn panel is installed with sounds of the silvery gibbons and their beautiful singing and enchanting calls they make, along with details of how the wildlife park is helping to save the gibbons from going extinct. The U-Turn has given visitors an immersive opportunity to learn more about the silver gibbons and how they can help with the zoo’s efforts to protect them.