The Tennessee State Museum, which opened in October 2018 on the corner of Rosa L. Parks Boulevard and Jefferson Street in Nashville, has already become a must-see attraction. Tracing its roots back to a museum opened by a portrait artist on the Nashville public square in 1817 and later to a state museum that consolidated World War I mementoes and other collections from the state, the Tennessee Historical Society and other groups, the current iteration of the Tennessee State Museum charges no admission fee and has become an important catalyst for the educational and cultural enrichment of Tennesseans and tourists alike.

Its mission is to procure, preserve, exhibit, and interpret objects that relate to the social, political, economic, and cultural history of Tennessee and Tennesseans. One of the largest museums in Nashville, it spans 137,000 square feet and has hosted hundreds of thousands of visitors since it opened.

A key component of the Tennessee State Museum is a flexible and feature-rich AV system that brings to life the history and stories it shares throughout its seven permanent exhibits and a rotating roster of temporary and seasonal exhibits. The museum additionally features a 200-seat Digital Learning and Outreach Center, and several common areas that host events, lectures, panel discussions, and film screenings.

“Particularly exciting is the way we tell these stories through sophisticated AV presentations,” said Ashley Howell, executive director of the Tennessee State Museum. “Each visitor learns differently—through seeing, hearing, and touching—and our audio-video presentations bring all of their senses into play as they explore artifacts and images, view documentaries and films, or interact with touchscreen displays.”

The museum won an Excellence in Development Award from the Nashville Chapter of the Urban Land Institute in September 2020 for its “design and construction, catalytic effect, standard of industry excellence, and environmental stewardship.” (YouTube link.) In addition to the museum’s executive team, the award recognized the efforts of the larger group responsible for the success, including Design & Production Inc. (D&P), a design, project management, and technology system integration firm for the museum market that was responsible for system fabrication; and Gallagher & Associates, a museum planning and design company that created all of the interpretive exhibits, graphics, and donor recognition efforts, and concepted all of the audio-visual experiences. Exhibit software at the Tennessee State Museum was developed by Cortina Productions, a creative media design and production company specializing in the museum field; and Northern Light Productions, creators of transformative experiences for brands, museums and public venues.

[ Museums Step Up Engagement with Next-Level Tech ] 

Sue Lepp, senior vice president at D&P, is gratified by visitors’ enthusiasm and critical acclaim the institution has received. She sees the facility as the blueprint for the modern museum.

“The vision of the Tennessee State Museum’s administration and the layout of the facility, combined with the important history-telling mission, made this a particularly rewarding project to work on,” said Lepp. “A museum experience should be entertaining as well as educational in order to draw repeat visitors and keep the interest of today’s tech-savvy audiences.”

Greg Matty, project executive at Gallagher & Associates, pointed out that this ambitious project was executed under a tight deadline, which made efficient teamwork essential.

“The timeframe for this project—to outfit a huge new building with state-of-the-art AV-driven exhibits—was only three years from start to finish, which was quite ambitious,” said Matty. “All parties pulled together to contribute value and deliver the world-class exhibits for visitors to enjoy and learn from for years to come.”

Next-Gen Exhibits Require High-Performing and Cost-Effective AV

Examples of the museum’s many interactive and visually engaging installations include the Tennessee Time Tunnel exhibit, which serves as the backbone for the entire permanent gallery. Its aim is to provide visitors a multi-layered experience with engaging media and thought-provoking interactive displays.

As visitors enter the Civil War and Reconstruction exhibit, they watch a five-minute video that sets the tone of the times before being plunged into an immersive experience that includes projected text and imagery, as well as transporting soundscapes. An interactive touch table with a map of Tennessee lets visitors access information and stories from the battlefield and beyond from each of the state’s 95 counties.

[ Enriching History with AV ] 

In the Tennessee Transforms exhibit, another interactive map enables visitors to learn about influences that have formed and continue to form the state’s cultural identity and people’s impression of the state. A theater within the museum hosts an interactive touch table and three large wall screens on which visitors can explore more than 100 cultural topics. The Digital Learning and Outreach Center provides presentation space and remote access to other museums, colleges, schools, and scholars.

To provide the necessary level of technical performance for these exhibits, the museum’s technical team chose a ZeeVee and Juniper Networks-driven Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE) AVoIP solution to distribute the wide array of AV content throughout the facility. For starters, the SDVoE AVoIP network is able to deliver high image quality with near-zero latency, which was essential for the interactive exhibits. The technology also gives the museum the flexibility to quickly scale to deliver content to additional endpoints as permanent and temporary exhibits call for more sources or displays to be connected.

Ambient sound is served to theaters and specialized exhibit subsystems via QSC’s Q-SYS Core 510 processor. Panasonic projectors and displays, 3M touchscreens, Dell computers, and BrightSign video players have been standardized across the various subsystems. A fiber backbone was implemented to distribute AV signals throughout the facility.

Ancillary equipment for custom touch tables included PQ Labs touch frames with Panasonic Videowall displays for interactivity. All source and signal distribution equipment is located in Middle Atlantic equipment racks.

ZeeVee encoders and decoders extend signals to more than 20 individual exhibit locations, many with multiple synced sources and displays. The entire system is networked via Juniper Networks EX4550 Ethernet switches. The user interface and unifying control system was custom programmed by D&P using Medialon Manager by 7thSense.

[ High-Tech Storytelling: Museums, Exhibits, and AV ] 

Of great importance to any public venue is the reliability and ease of maintenance in support of the visitor programs. The networked and digital character of the selected equipment provides a reliable and maintainable system that is able to operate year round on an automated schedule, with options to support special events after hours. Component failures can’t always be prevented, but the ability to troubleshoot remotely via the Medialon control system and network access to the Juniper, ZeeVee, and Q-SYS signal distribution systems lessens the burden on the educators and museum staff.

The Tennessee State Museum’s administrators, staff, and sponsors have all been impressed by the widespread positive attention the institution has generated and credit the role technology has played.

“We wanted to elevate the exhibits from passive to active experiences that highlight the eras, individuals, and artists who have contributed to the development of Tennessee’s identity within the state, and its role on the national and international stage,” said Howell. “Our partners on this project brought great enthusiasm along with impressive skill sets to create a dynamic AV system that enabled us to meet our goal.”

Click here to read more stories from the August 2021 issue of SCN.

More About Museum AV

High-Tech Storytelling: Museums, Exhibits, and AV • As the museum and exhibits market seeks new ways of telling stories and engaging the public, AV is playing a starring role.

Enriching History with AV • Museums are finding themselves in the position of having to balance the function of educating and entertaining visitors with very specific health and safety requirements. For help, museum directors are relying on integrators to assist them in creating experiences that are both safe and engaging.

Museums Step Up Engagement with Next-Level Tech • Museums are moving from "objects under glass" to destinations for interactive and immersive experiences. Learn how several centers are working to capture the interest of younger generations with innovative technology solutions that enable captivating storytelling.

Staying Engaged in a Contactless World • From the way patrons purchase tickets or interact with those at the help desk to the way exhibitions are laid out and designed, museums are currently planning for new operating procedures that will revolve around guest safety and contactless technology, while not diminishing the overall experience.

Recent Exhibits

Statue of Liberty Museum Brings History to Life with Panasonic Projection • Diversified and Panasonic developed and implemented an immersive projection system at New York's Statue of Liberty Museum to help deliver an engaging experience for visitors.

Museum of Science and Industry Welcomes Visitors with AV Stumpfl • The Museum of Science and Industry has reopened with a new look for its Pioneer Zephyr exhibition, complete with digital and analog projection solutions from AV Stumpfl.

Crafting an Immersive Soundscape • ACMI, Australia’s national museum of screen culture, uses Audinate’s Dante to create a soundscape that uses both localized sound and sound that exists as a background across the entire gallery space.

Mad Systems Blasts Off at the Temecula Children’s Museum • When the staff at the Temecula Children’s Museum wanted to create a new exhibit for the fictional Professor Pennypickle, they turned to Mad Systems who used projection mapping to allow visitors to experience time and space travel.

Quick Bio

Name: Matt Barton

Position: Managing Director/CEO

Company: 7thSense Design

SCN: Tell me about your career before 7th Sense Design.

MATT BARTON: I had a varied career in early life with jobs ranging from shop assistant to circus performer. I ended up working for an international flight simulation and visual innovation company, working my way up through the ranks from administrator to an apprenticeship in project management to displays product manager, which included overseeing the development, launch, and integration of an HDR projector and fully immersive display system for the F35 Fast Jet flight simulator. Toward the end of my time in the simulation business, I began studying for an MBA, which I completed in 2014.

Outside of professional life, I’ve been the leader of a UK Scout group for young people with disabilities based in Sussex (2nd Chailey) for a number of years. I’ve been involved with the group for most of my life and have seen changes in the way people with disabilities are integrated into society and welcomed into a global organization like the Scouts. As an active group, 2nd Chailey has visited many theme parks and visitor attractions over the years and I’ve seen first-hand examples of inclusion and exclusion alike—this is one of the many reasons I’m so passionate about improving the inclusivity and shared experience elements of attractions.

SCN: What attracted you about working for 7thSense?

MB: I was very much interested in technology during my time in the simulation world, but I found it more interesting how technology could be used for leisure and entertainment than for military and flight applications.

A couple of colleagues (Adam Neale and Ian Macpherson) from the simulation company I was working for left to set up 7th Sense, and a few years later asked me to join the team and apply my skillset in the entertainment industry—the rest is history. It’s hugely rewarding to work for an agile, fast-growing company rather than a behemoth.

SCN: You’ve been with the company six years now. How has it changed over that time?

MB: We’ve experienced a lot of growth—the company was five people strong when I joined, and now we are over 30. As well as growing in size to keep up with the demands of the industry, we have become smarter and more efficient: adopting processes to manage large orders and large customer businesses while retaining the agility and focus on service and support that has defined us as a company since inception.

In recent years, our operation has expanded to include two North American offices in Detroit and Orlando, which has really allowed us to maintain exceptional service standards across all time zones, and support a product range that’s continually developing and diversifying for the different markets we serve.

SCN: What are some of the biggest tech developments you’ve seen during your time at 7thSense?

MB: We’re lucky enough to be in an area of technology that develops at a fast pace, and as an innovation-led software company, we’re always on the leading edge of these developments. We’ve been able to take quick advantage of faster and more expansive solid-state drive technology, higher-performance graphics cards and incredible developments in data transmission speeds—both internal and via network.

Among the many benefits this has presented to our business, it’s enabled us to serve uncompressed, high-bit-depth media to more channels from single servers, and to add a vast range of functionality across the product line.

SCN: You travel a lot in your role. Are there big differences in the sectors you operate in around the world?

MB: While we do operate globally, we operate in a tight industry. I have the pleasure of running into many of the same faces in different places around the world, from master planners to installers.

Our end user locations present significant cultural differences, not to mention environmental differences. We have seen huge budget variations around the world in recent years, but one thing does remain consistent irrespective of location: there continues to be a general desire across the industry for the quality to be right up there. Wherever in the world you go, the bar is constantly being raised, and that’s a challenge we relish.

SCN: Working with the kinds of eye-catching technologies you do, when was the last time you were truly blown away by a technology or solution?

MB: The imagination and the ever-more-innovative ways that the creative people in our industry use technology on projects we’re involved in continually blow me away.

I’m a displays guy, so I find myself incredibly critical of display quality—particularly contrast, motion blur and resolution. One project that really impressed me by overcoming these issues was 3D Live’s “Holographic” 3D LED Display technology as demonstrated in the Mass Effect: New Earth attraction in California. The project has been recognized with a Thea Award for Innovative Technology. The contrast that’s achieved and the brightness of the display are unparalleled and make the sense of immersion in the 3D environment they are creating some of the best I’ve ever seen.

Another mind-blowing example of technology in action is Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure at Shanghai Disneyland. The sheer scale of this experience took the idea of immersion to another level.

SCN: What area of technology do you think is currently the most dynamic and fast-changing?

MB: Data transmission speed continues to open new doors every day, and we are also seeing some display technologies changing very fast. For example, flexible displays—I foresee these being much more important to our industry in the future.

I believe augmented reality has a place in our industry, but we have yet to see the ideal display technology to best support the many opportunities that AR has to offer.

SCN: How do you approach the balance between creating shared experiences and delivering greater personalization? Is it one or the other, or can they coexist?

MB: I believe they have to coexist. There are many different ways of balancing this, and we will see many attractions that feature new ways of doing this in the next few years.

The ability for everyone to follow the same storyline but still have their own “personal twist” is very exciting. We are seeing attraction “lands” being built where attendees have a personal experience up to the point of getting on the ride—in the future, I see this extending the personalized experience into the ride itself. There is a balance to be had to make sure the ride is enjoyable for everybody, which will be one of the hurdles that storytellers will have to find new and interesting ways to tackle. Our job as technologists is to support them in doing so. This is one of the areas of our industry that truly excites me, and 7thSense enjoys working with creative companies to establish the best technology solutions for this purpose.

SCN: Are there any downsides to the greater emphasis now placed on creating memorable experiences in AV?

MB: The risk of using technology for the sake using technology is always there. Amazing things can be achieved with modern technology, but there still needs to be a great story behind the technology veil.

It’s the story that makes the experience memorable. The best use of technology is seamless storytelling, where the technology augments but doesn’t dominate the experience. One has to know when to stop—making sure that if you’re telling the story of an ancient artifact, you don’t degrade or dilute it by swamping it with technology that does not add to story itself.

SCN: How do you hope to evolve the business over the next few years?

MB: This is an incredible time for our industry—there are so many new parks and attractions in development. I’m excited to be part of a team at 7th Sense that’s supplying technology into these parks and attractions, and am focused on ensuring we have a global presence that can support the industry’s growth. We’re planning to grow our North American operation and other global locations as part of this.

7th Sense is continually evolving. Key to this is our flexibility and dynamism. We have a number of new products coming to market soon that we believe will continue to serve the market and prove the performance of the business. Watch this space!

This article was originally published in Installation Magazine. 

The “XI Gallery” recently opened in New York’s Meatpacking District—a hybrid art installation and showroom for architect Bjarke Ingels’ luxury residences and a hotel under construction at “The XI” (pronounced The Eleventh) building a few blocks away. Its feature commanding most attention, from both invited guests and the street, is a curiously shaped, 33-foot-wide model of Lower Manhattan, comprised of more than 10,000 miniature 3D-printed and hand-cut buildings. Technology West Group installed and commissioned 7thSense Delta Media Servers to bring projection mapping life to “The Egg”.

Es Devlin—renowned for her stage design for theatre and artists such as Beyoncé and Kanye West, her pieces at Victoria & Albert Museum and Art Basel, an Olympics closing ceremony, and most recently, a projection mapped story at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity—is the artist behind The Egg and two other pieces in the gallery.

Devlin’s Manhattan is warped and fitted inside a quarter ovoid shape, using relative scaling tricks to force a unique perspective of the cityscape (including an unashamed emphasis on The XI building). This butts to a mirrored ceiling—a motif employed throughout the gallery—completing the appearance of an egg cross-section.

The Egg video system comprises seven Barco F80-4K9 4K DLP laser projectors, fed by two genlocked Delta Infinity media servers, via HDBaseT extenders. Intricate alignment of each projector image relative to the model is accomplished using Delta’s “3D Calibration” tool, combined critically with an accurate laser-scanned model of the built object.

“It takes a team with a lot of respect for accuracy to get a clean mapping result on an object this detailed,” said Ken Showler, experience director at 7thSense Design. “A little ‘off’ in the 3D model goes a long way. DBox and Farkas Falop have done an amazing job producing this model and content, positioning TechWest and my crew to produce an alignment we are proud of. Very little traditional 2D pixel warp was used beyond the 3D calibration stage here, and so the accuracy of 3D parallax was minimally compromised.

“Blending projectors is also a significant challenge on a model like this. For each given pixel of the 3D surface texture, there are a bunch of factors that should drive the decision of how much light is best to take from each projector, to achieve a uniformly lit result using the best quality available pixels. Some model surfaces have one projector hitting them, while others have two, three, or four. Each lens will be a different distance from each given surface, and each lens may have a different field of view, resulting in differences in brightness across the model. Each lens also has a depth of field, and an incident angle at which it hits each given surface, resulting in brighter and less smeared pixels on one surface versus the next. This decision process is managed by an emerging Autoblend tool that will become available officially with our next-generation software release. We used an early implementation of this on The Egg with great results.”

“With the detail of the client’s vision and the unique surface that we were working upon, we felt that the Delta Media Server platform was the only choice for a reliable and configurable server for this creative project,” said Brad Cornish, principal at Technology West Group. “The team at 7thSense helped deliver a solid and reliable system, while also keeping a flexible platform for the artists to work upon."

The XI Gallery is located at 25 Little West 12th Street and opened to the public on May 14.

When people visit a museum of a historical event—of a Civil War battle, for example—they expect to be transported to that era by means of artifacts and period-costumed staff. But what about an event so close to the present, one that nearly every adult watched unfold live on television? The answer, of course, is absorbing audiovisual elements, and the National September 11 Memorial Museum has them in spades.

“Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing that morning, and I think the audiovisual aspect of the museum really brings you back to that moment in time,” said Fernando Mora, the museum’s manager of audiovisual and multimedia technology. “You walk through those doors of the historical exhibition, you hear the 9-1-1 calls from the first responders, and you get a real sense of the initial confusion and chaos of the moment, followed by the panic after the second plane hits the South Tower, then the subsequent collapse of the towers. I believe audiovisual experience plays a large part in this effort without overshadowing the physical artifacts. I think the exhibit designers struck the perfect tone in this regard which is no easy task.”

Telling the Story

Located largely beneath the accompanying 9/11 Memorial in the foundations of the original World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, the museum features some 150,000 square feet of exhibition space and more than 90 AV exhibits that add to its educational, experiential, and memorial functions. Designed by integration firm Electrosonic and opened in May of 2014, the AV operations have been fully under the care of the museum’s own team, led by Mora.

Since then, the AV team—which consists of Mora as manager/engineer, AV engineer Jose Vazquez and two technicians, Chris Fraley and Marc Thompson—are in charge of all day-to-day operations and internal upgrades.

“The vast majority of the AV projects are designed, engineered, and installed in house,” Mora said. “We very rarely go out to integrators for these projects. I have an integration background, and so does our engineer, Jose Vazquez."

This may seem like a tall task—even more so, considering that much of the AV equipment is due for a refresh, owing to an unforeseen setback that delayed the museum’s opening.

Projectors are a big part of the upgrade process, according to Mora. Of the museum’s 64 projectors, 24 have been replaced with Christie G Series laser-based models; of the others, 27 lamp-based Digital Projection models will be exchanged with laser units in 2018 saving us approximately $400,000 in lamp costs over the life of the projector. This is an important consideration, given the museum’s extensive hours of operation and inaccessibility of some of the units: in the cavernous Foundation Hall, for instance, three lamp-based projectors are mounted within the 60-foot-high ceiling, and lamp changes and maintenance necessitate bringing in a very large scissor lift.

Getting signals to all the exhibits around the sprawling facility isn’t easy either, and is another area ripe for enhancement in the coming years. On the audio side, Peavey MediaMatrix NION DSPs in the three control rooms use CobraNet for audio distribution; Mora said that the museum is in the midst of gradually moving this process to Dante. On the video side, Adtec SignEdje Watchout and 7th Sense players send signals via Extron transmitters and receivers via DVI-D.

“This is still a traditional AV system, but it has a lot of IT components to it,” Mora said. “Every device here has an IP address; I can get to anything remotely. Our network has five VLANs, but they’re mostly for control, monitoring and intersystem data communication. We’re putting small amounts of video on it, little by little, as we ramp up. The idea is to completely go AV over IP over the next three years.”

One way that Mora is selling the idea to upgrade to AV over IP to the museum’s budget decision makers is the “disaster recovery element,” as he calls it: the freedom from relying on so many physical devices that could be damaged in a future flooding event. “If one control room gets flooded, this entire wing of the museum is down, and we have to find a way to get system operational again quickly,” he said. “But if we were to go AV over IP, we are less reliant on where the sources originate from. We can take the show, bring it over another control room, and drive the content from there.”

However, Mora acknowledges this transition can’t be rushed: with as many as 90 individual exhibits and 120 video streams (accounting for blended exhibits) playing at once, the move to full IP requires patience. “Those are things you have to scale up for,” he said. “You have to buy the hardware, give your IT managers a chance to balance the load, and be able to handle it, or else all we’re doing is going from a stable system to an unstable system, and that’s not going to help.”

While audio and video presentations play a powerful part in telling the story of the events of 9/11, they are equally moving in aiding in the memorial aspect of the space. A central feature of the museum is the memorial exhibition. Lining four walls within the footprint of the original foundation of the World Trade Center South Tower are portraits of almost all of the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the 2001 and 1993 attacks. Around that space are several ELO 3243L interactive touch display tables, where visitors can look up more information on each victim. Visitors can then choose to send a person’s profile into an interior room or what the museum calls “Inner Chamber” where their name and information are projected onto a screen and a recording of their name is played. There is also a wing featuring recording booths, where visitors can record testimonial videos about loved ones or their memories of the event.

In the atrium, there is an auditorium that, while normally functioning as a theater that screens films every 30 minutes over the course of the day, can also serve as a lecture hall and event space with sophisticated broadcasting abilities. Using a NewTek 460 video production switcher, the auditorium’s control room can pull from the space’s Sennheiser SKM5200-II wireless mics and three Sony BRC-H700 PTZ cameras, and broadcast out a streaming feed of the occasional large event, such as when Yankees’ erstwhile manager Joe Torre spoke about the importance of baseball in restoring normalcy to the city after the attack.

Maintaining the Message

Keeping a facility of this scale running smoothly would be a challenge for any size team; with just four technicians, the museum’s AV team certainly has its hands full. With a weekly operating schedule of nearly 80 hours and more than 11,000 visitors streaming through its exhibits on an average day, a lot can go wrong.

“Every day there are some exhibits that are problematic,” Mora said. “Ninety-five percent of our exhibits, if they’re having a particular technical issue, they happen in the morning: as PCs boot up, players start, or projectors turn on after being off overnight.”

Sometimes, a particular piece of equipment will require some clever troubleshooting. One of the touch-tables in the memorial exhibition area would have issues turning on, and Mora’s team eventually figured out it was the result of a problem with the hot-plug detection on those screens, so they changed the entire design of it. Several projectors in a film screening room would blow their lamps in the middle of the day; they discovered the cause was outdated firmware. The Macs capturing a visitor’s testimonial in the recording booths would frequently crash, so the team wrote a script that delayed the launch of the recording software one minute after booting up, exponentially reducing the incidence of failure.

Mora says the key to staying on top of maintenance for over 1000 devices is assiduous documentation. Using a database management system called Atlassian Jira, he keeps detailed reports on every issue in each exhibit. “[In the database,] the problems have a line of issues month by month, and it’ll show you right when we made a change, and how that affected the fault reporting,” he said.

Meticulous reporting also prevents small problems from persisting. “If there’s an audio wand that’s not working, one of the technicians fixes it I wouldn’t typically know about it,” Mora said. “But because I keep track of it in JIRA, I can tell how many times that one wand has failed, that allows me to provide resources to it, monetarily, or equipment wise, that helps resolve problems.”

All of these preventative and reactive measures have so far kept malfunctions mostly invisible to the public, allowing the audiovisual elements to meld with and enhance the transformative gravity of the space. Mora said he’s read many reviews of the museum on TripAdvisor extolling AV’s role in enriching the experience.

“I feel that in many ways we are the custodians of this incredible content; it’s a very important part of the museum, because of the time in which it happened,” he said. “We were in an audiovisual age at the time, and there were many cameras in the hands of the public, as opposed to something that happened during World War II where many events went undocumented, for example.”

But ultimately, Mora believes that AV—no matter how moving—is merely an instrument for conveying the solemnity of the space, and for retelling the events of a day that changed America forever. “I think that when people come here, they leave with a completely different perspective on what that day was,” he said. “For us, it’s not the audiovisual; it’s what’s being displayed here, and our job is to make sure the story is told clearly, that it looks good, sounds good, and we’ll let the story tell itself. The story is powerful enough; it’s not something that we need to add anything to.”