Celebrating the many stories of Western Australia

WA Museum Boola Bardip

Woman standing in WA Museum Boola Bardip, wearing headphones, holding a phone, and looking up at a whale skeleton.

WA Museum Boola Bardip — “many stories” in Nyoongar language — brings to life Western Australia’s unique cultural and scientific collections. Ahead of its re-opening in November 2020, the museum wanted a digital platform and mobile guide that could seamlessly integrate with its significant collection database and deliver interactive visitor experiences.

In partnership with Multiplex, WA Museum and the Western Australia State Government, we delivered a whole-of-museum platform, powered by our Museum Operating System (MOS) drawing from the existing WA Museum Exhibition content management system. We also created Gogo, a digital guide that gives visitors everything they need to enjoy their visit.

Taking a holistic approach as we do with every project, we also drew heavily on the talents of our incredibly resourceful Creative Services team who collaborated with scriptwriters, composers and museum staff 100% remotely during 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Services
Experience strategy
Interactive media
Augmented & virtual reality
Location-aware audio
Immersive sound
Technology platform
Location-aware guides
Operation & content management systems
Beacons & Wifi solutions
Partner

Western Australian Museum

Location

Perth, Australia

Challenge

Our brief involved a broad yet clear checklist of must-haves: a platform to support and elevate unique and purposeful storytelling perspectives, a cohesive and engaging site-wide digital experience for the museum’s eight galleries, and the ability to measure success and iterate. WA Museum also wanted the ability to connect with visitors beyond the physical museum and provide a gateway to the broader offerings of Western Australia.

The project called for a site-wide digital transformation to support both staff and visitor needs.

A young woman is reading information on a touch screen digital label at the Western Australian museum Boola Bardip. She is standing in front of a glass showcase
Screen showing GoGo app screen displaying graphics and text related to the object 'Journey of the Wargyl'
Mobile screen showing app interface of the GoGo app with grid of images
Screenshot of GoGo app displaying images of different minerals on a black background with the heading 'Many minerals'

Approach

What we do at Art Processors is equal parts technical and creative—our experiences are nothing without both. What we do is also typically end-to-end, including content strategy and creative to engineering and ongoing support. These integrated capabilities allow us to push the limits of creativity and technology while grounding us in what is relevant to audiences. With that in mind, our engineering team collaborated with the museum’s engineers to build the APIs needed to integrate the museum’s systems with MOS, while our design and mobile teams were able to quickly develop intuitive and accessible applications for iOS and Android, ensuring cross-platform compatibility for the same flawless experiences, regardless of device.
Overcoming social distancing and border closures, we collaborated with some incredible Indigenous scriptwriters and local voice over artists to produce the moving stories (as told by First Nations communities in their own voices) and evocative soundscapes visitors hear as they wander the museum.

A young man is standing in front of a blue whale skeleton hanging in a museum. He is wearing headphones and holding an iPod touch listening to the Gogo app at the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip

 

Art Processors understood the sort of production value and sensibility we were after, but also understood the need for stakeholder and community consultation in what was a concise period in creating the platform.

– Helen Simondson,
   Manager, WA Museum Boola Bardip

We worked closely with a dinosaur experts to bring to life a Luluichnus Mueckei — Lulu, as we affectionately nicknamed her — an AR stegosaurus experience.

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3D render of a stegosaur

Solution

The Gogo app provides everything a visitor needs to make the most of their visit. Two immersive audio experiences featuring local stories and original music let visitors choose how they want to explore the museum: Let Us Guide You is a curated journey covering 80 highlights of the collection, while Go Your Own Way lets visitors wander the galleries and learn about the objects closest to them via location-aware beacons. Digital labels and touchpoints located throughout the galleries encourage interaction with the collection, while interactive maps via the app help visitors find their way around the museum.
Enabling these site-wide digital experiences is the Museum Digital Platform, powered by MOS. It empowers museum staff, giving them control to add and edit visitor experiences. It also provides intuitive data and analytics so staff can make informed decisions to improve visitor engagement.

  • 8 Custom immersive tours we created for the Gogo Guide, comprising of 70 featured object stops across all tours
  • 258 Stops the Museum has added to the Go Your Own Way audio experience. Our platform is supporting the Museum to build out their own rich content
  • 1,496 Distinct objects included in digital labels across 33 showcases
A woman is standing in a room at the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip. She is looking up at the backlit ceiling and is wearing headphones listening to an audio guide

In the Press

Further Reading

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In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge the many Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and honour Elders past, present and emerging. We respect their deep, enduring connection to their lands, waterways and surrounding clan groups since time immemorial. We cherish the richness of First Nations Peoples’ artistic and cultural expressions.