The new Museum of Money’s goal is to make financial literacy fun. To this end, this Dallas-based museum, nicknamed “MoMoney,” is using AV to turn learning into an interactive gaming experience for guests of all ages.
Early on, MoMoney co-founders Houss El Marabti and Subhi Gharbieh recognized that helping guests build financial literacy required a spectacular, nontraditional approach. This is why MoMoney uses large-scale interactive AV exhibits that use storytelling to guide visitors along the entire evolutionary path of money—from physical minting to modern blockchain technology.
Gamifying Financial Education
To bring this unconventional vision to life, MoMoney assembled a team of AV and design professionals. Lead design firm Luci brought in Fivestone Studios to develop the digital interactive experiences. The team worked alongside Ravenswood Studio, which built the physical environments, and Electrosonic, which served as the primary technology integrator.
"Working very closely with Luci’s project leads, our team focused on making financial concepts feel intuitive and fun," said Traylor Woodall, Fivestone's executive creative director. "We wanted visitors to feel the ideas, knowing that when people learn through experiences, the lessons stay with them."
Justin Eslinger, Fivestone's director of creative technology and innovation, said the team designed each interactive AV exhibit by starting with a specific learning objective—and then finding the clearest way to make that idea physical. "Instead of asking guests to simply read about financial concepts, we wanted them to experience those concepts directly," Eslinger told SCN. "The goal was to make financial literacy feel less like a lesson and more like an adventure."
Installing experiential AV in a downtown Dallas venue came with its share of unique hurdles. According to Cindy Ospina, director of project management, Electrosonic, space constraints were a primary challenge during the integration phase. Her team had to fit highly complex, interactive exhibits within the predefined physical limits of the building's architecture, which was not exceptionally large.
Additionally, because MoMoney is in a busy public space, absolute reliability and ADA compliance were paramount. This is why MoMoney was equipped with AV hardware that could be powered on at 8 a.m. and run flawlessly without intervention until the end of the day. "Our goal was to deliver a modern engaging visitor experience... making sure that it would function reliably in a super high traffic environment," said Ospina.
Another significant challenge was MoMoney’s diverse audience. The AV exhibits needed to cater to everyone from young children to sophisticated adults. To achieve this, Electrosonic worked closely with Fivestone, Luci, and subject matter experts to ensure the AV technology balanced interactive fun with genuine, accessible educational content for all ages.
Creating an AV environment where guests could seamlessly explore and shape outcomes required a large, cohesive technology stack. At the heart of their digital experiences was the Unity real-time engine. Choosing Unity allowed Fivestone to deliver rapid iteration, cinematic-quality animation, and highly responsive interactions between the digital software and the physical hardware.
Electrosonic provided a robust custom solution for the museum's AV infrastructure. For system-wide show control and audio processing, the integration team installed QSC hardware, including a remote-controlled QSC core, Dante controllers, and a mix of QSC and Powersoft amplifiers to drive the museum's analog audio and soundscapes. BrightSign video players were widely deployed to manage and run content across MoMoney’s various displays. High-performance Origin PCs, equipped with high-end NVIDIA RTX GPUs, were used to provide the local processing power needed for complex 3D graphics and on-site AI workflows.
Take a Tour
The true magic of MoMoney lies in its six distinct interactive installations, each purposefully designed to teach an abstract financial lesson using a playable, highly visual environment.
Market Shuffle: This exhibit drops visitors into a fictional town to teach the actual value of currency by forcing them to barter for goods. Designed to recreate the frustration and inefficiency of trading without money, the installation prompts guests to ask themselves, "How many roller skates is a birthday cake worth? How do I get change for trading a tube television for slap bracelets?"
The exhibit features a 32-inch touchscreen paired with a custom-printed physical overlay, giving guests the illusion of sitting at a three-dimensional desk filled with phones, rolodexes, and notes. Behind the scenes, Fivestone built a branching trade logic system in Unity, using escalating music, audio cues, and difficulty modes to increase tension as guests wildly race against a countdown clock.
Hoard of Gold: This exhibit uses motion capture and projection mapping so that "guests can see themselves swimming through a vault of treasure, turning wealth into a full-body spectacle,” Eslinger said. Technically speaking, this exhibit uses an Orbbec Femto Mega depth sensor camera combined with NVIDIA Background Removal and Microsoft’s Azure Kinect Body Tracking SDK, while Christie and Epson projectors map the resulting interactive visual effects onto a large display.
Financial Tellers: Reimagining the classic Zoltar fortuneteller robotic machine, this exhibit delivers financial advice using life-sized 60-inch Samsung 4K displays. Guests speak into a mounted microphone. A custom machine learning system identifies the topic and triggers one of more than 200 scripted responses. According to Eslinger, the design team had to combine “natural voice input, machine learning topic detection, AI-assisted animation, synchronized audio, and DMX lighting to make the interaction feel alive.”
NYSE Photo Opportunity: This New York Stock Exchange installation distills the dizzying complexity of the stock market into a simple choice between a bull and a bear. Guests trigger the experience by pressing a button to ring the iconic NYSE bell. “The exhibit uses a large-format display, animated bull and bear characters, and randomized outcomes to make market risk feel immediate and playful,” said Eslinger. The resulting interaction is displayed on a massive 110-inch LG display featuring exaggerated, high-energy character animations inspired by 1980s anime.
Interest Invaders: This exhibit leans on 8-bit Atari 2600 graphics to teach the notoriously difficult concept of compound interest. Guests use oversized physical arcade controls and manually spin a large physical wheel—seamlessly integrated using Phidgets USB hubs and sensors—to make long-term investment choices. “Interest Invaders turns compound interest into a retro arcade game, using oversized physical controls and a 6-foot-wide Nanolumens LED display with a deliberately chunky pixel pitch to reinforce the 8-bit aesthetic,” Eslinger explained.
Design Your Own Currency: In this exhibit, visitors can edit their own faces into custom currency. To do this, Eslinger said Fivestone and Electrosonic combined “a touchscreen kiosk, live camera capture, local AI portrait rendering, web application infrastructure, email delivery, and a Unity-driven projection wall so guests can create, receive, and celebrate their own custom bill."
The touchscreen kiosk interface is powered by React and Electron, with Supabase securely managing guest sessions and Resend handling direct email delivery. A local AI rendering pipeline transforms the guest's portrait into a stylized engraving in a mere three seconds, bypassing cloud latency. The completed designs are then displayed on a large projection wall using a Christie projector and Christie Twist mapping software.
Delivering the Payoff
The MoMoney museum proves that interactive AV technology can teach complex ideas in an effective and entertaining manner. According to the museum's co-founders, these innovative approaches are already "paying off wonderfully.”
Ospina added that visitors are spending significantly more time actively interacting with the exhibits rather than just glancing at traditional museum placards or printed graphics. Plus, the varied exhibits are successfully engaging young children and adults with their intuitive, responsive, and clever designs.
The bottom line: By seamlessly blending motion tracking cameras, projection mapping, immersive LED displays, custom physical overlays, and dynamic audio, the MoMoney AV system has made learning fun and engaging. As Woodall said, this approach has turned complexity into "something fluid, cohesive, and deeply engaging."
