Toronto Railway Museum

Toronto Railway Museum

In this project, we were tasked in groups of three to design, prototype, and pitch a new interactive exhibit for the Toronto Railway Museum.

Project Detail

George Brown 2022

Real World Project Lab

January - April 2022

Role

User Research

Ideation

Prototyping

Duration

8 Weeks

Research

We started our process with a precedent study looking into different examples of successful museums both locally and globally.

We had two main focuses - the first being Miniatur Wunderland, a large-scale miniature diorama city with various towns all with moving and functioning automation that users can interact with. Our second focus was on the Van Gogh exhibit which used various projectors to bring guests into the artwork.

We incorporated some of the strengths noticed from the previously mentioned exhibits and decided it would be crucial to take advantage of the Toronto Railway Museum’s partnership with LEGO. We decided that using LEGO would allow us to recreate a more immersive experience and create a perfect pairing with LEGO’s diorama-type nature with trains. With this, we could cater a fully immersive experience that could appeal to a family audience.

We developed our research to help provide support for this idea by conducting a survey. The survey mainly asked for overall interest in trains and the railway museum as well as their relationship with specific experience technologies such as AR/VR. This was an important insight as we planned to integrate AR solutions for those who live too far away to visit the museum.

We created personas for our target audience as well as storyboards to illustrate our customer’s experiences within the exhibit. We targeted families who would be visiting the exhibit together in person, as well as younger individuals who live outside of the city and are more tech-savvy.

Prototype

We then went on to develop a system map to help plot out what the integral pillars would be to bring this idea to life. We created some sketches to better visualize how our VR experiences of the exhibit would look.

We wanted to balance our focus on both the physical exhibit and diorama, as well as the VR experience to make sure guests got the most out of the museum despite their choice of experience.

Next, our group began finalizing our branding elements along with starting the development process on our prototype to incorporate into our pitch.

Our prototype focus was centered around VR as we felt it was our most unique feature and would also serve as a good showcase of the changes that would be made to the current exhibit.

Lastly, we made developed a video to showcase our final prototype. We received very positive feedback on our choice to use the LEGO partnership in order to attract a more family-oriented audience. We also received very positive feedback on our use of VR as it would help attract new guests who otherwise would not have the opportunity to visit the museum.

Personal Reflection

During my work on Locomotive VR, I focused on the implementation of remote solutions to on-site interactive projects. The nature of this project helped me learn the importance of being flexible in ideation and devolvement in order to help make more accessible mediums to a wider range of users. Collaboration with team members while brainstorming helped us reach a solution that served not only as a fix for users who could not access our project in person but also as a distinct feature that added to the project itself.