In 2012 The Cleveland Museum of Art underwent a major renovation of its most visible space, Gallery One. Local Projects designed a comprehensive interactive experience that encompasses the entire gallery, including the largest showpiece, the Collection Wall. Pretty Extreme Inc. was brought on to make this technically challenging interactive video wall design a reality.

The Collection Wall is the largest multi-touch wall in the United States. Forty feet wide, it supports up to 16 simultaneous users. Thousands of objects on view in the museum are represented on the wall, flowing through different layouts to illustrate different themes present in the works. Visitors can interact with the objects, viewing related objects and getting more information. A dedicated iPad app, designed by Local Projects, allows an iPad to be docked to the Collection Wall, allowing a visitor to “Favorite” an artwork and save it to their iPad, creating custom tours that they can bring to the rest of their museum experience.

The Collection Wall is an openFrameworks system running on two synchronized Windows 7 workstations. The wall is comprised of 150 Christie MicroTiles with a combined desktop size of roughly 13600×1700 pixels. The Christie iKit system provides multi-touch capability for up to 10 touch points across each half of the wall. Integration of the system was handled by Zenith Systems.

New York Times Coverage: Technology That Serves to Enhance, Not Distract