University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital

The photo above is the Discovery Wall, part of a project that the company I work for, Sensory Environment Design, recently completed in the lobby of the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital.

What you see is a custom built 10' x 6' offset oval rear-projection screen, henceforth the Big Screen, with three porthole touchscreens located below it at varying heights. Just above the two outside touchscreens are smaller portholes that house cameras and below all three touchscreens are focused speakers.

The Big Screen's primary purpose is to display a donor waterfall, a cascading series of names of people, businesses and foundations who donated to the Hospital. In addition to the donor waterfall, the Big Screen interacts with content on the porthole touchscreens and can even show the Gopher football game.

When no one is around the porthole touchscreens are in screen saver mode, displaying the same donor waterfall as the Big Screen. But when someone approaches the Discovery Wall a motion sensor trips and the touchscreens come out of screen saver mode and go into content mode, where people can interact with them to find out information about the hospital, lookup donors, and even play some games.

There are three different games for visitors to play with; finger painting, creature finder, and photo booth. The finger painting game allows users to send the finished artwork to a patient in the hospital (after it is approved by a moderator) and the photo booth game results in a picture of the user being briefly displayed on the Big Screen.



Viewed from the side you can see that the big screen leans out from the wall. To get such a large image with that amount of depth we had to use a short throw projector as well as a first surface mirror. The projector is actually mounted at the top of the enclosure, pointing back at the wall, it bounces off the mirror and onto the rear projection screen material.

The porthole touchscreens are actually 47" LCD touch monitors turned on their sides, the same as what we used in the Amplatz Kiosk pictured below.



Like the Discovery Wall, the Amplatz Kiosk displays the donor waterfall until someone trips the motion sensor, the Amplatz Kiosk doesn't have any games though, it functions as more of an information station.

Here's the obligatory rack shot.



The system is controlled with AMX via a touchscreen in the rack (above the monitor in the picture) and a virtual panel that can be accessed via a web browser. Most of the control however, happens automatically based on a defined schedule and we get email updates on any pertinent information, like bulb hours and system downtime.

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Some of the companies whose products were used on this project:

Spyeglass
Spyeworks
AMX
Dakota Audio
LG