Panama | The Biomuseo is one of Panama’s sightseeing highlights. Housed in a spectacular building by famous architect Frank Gehry at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, the museum offers eight exhibitions in six parts of the building. invidis visited a fascinating and immersive exhibition in this extraordinary museum.
Apart from the world-famous Panama Canal and the historic old town – which has also been used as a backdrop for the James Bond movie “Quantom of Solace” – visitors to Panama actually get to see very little that is extraordinary. But since the opening of Biomuseo Panama, the biodiversity exhibition has become a must visit – and not just for digital signage aficionados.
In eight galleries designed by the agency Without Boundaries, the museum presents the development of Panama’s biodiversity over the past three million years. The Central American country is the natural land bridge between North and South America and lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.
The museum opened in 2014, but the last exhibition area has only been completed in 2019. The last three galleries, which offer much more complex and immersive experiences, were developed by international design firm Tellart.
The customer journey is unique and well implemented, thanks to the intelligent integration of digital signage technology: visitors wander between 360-degree projections and interactive screens in the air-conditioned museum followed by outdoor exhibitions with hundreds of species of butterflies in the scorching heat of the jungle. Digital technology meets nature, exactly as you would expect from an exhibition focused on the natural world.
Three particularly impressive areas
The exhibition begins with the immersive spatial projection Panamarama, which takes visitors on a journey through the rainforest and both oceans of Panama. The high-resolution images, produced with great effort, are captivating. What we particularly like about the projection is that it doesn’t take place in a dark room. Instead, the screens are scattered around the space like puzzle pieces, complementing the museum’s architecture. Visitors stand on a glass floor, which is also projected from below, allowing them to literally feel and smell the rainforest. (Video)
The entire film production took five years, as shown in the Making of Panamarama. The Panamarama was also the first part of the exhibition to open. (Link to the making-of video)
Building the Bridge and Oceans Divided
The exhibition sections Building the Bridge and Oceans Divided use various digital signage touchpoints along the visitor journey. Visitors learn about gravity and the effects of earthquakes through touch displays and interactive exhibits.
Ocean Divided has two huge aquariums that show visitors the differences in the fauna and flora of the Pacific and Caribbean ecosystems. In the very dark exhibition rooms, however, the digital touchpoints play only a minor role. They complement the large aquariums with appropriate information in Spanish and English.
Our personal highlight is the last exhibition area, “Panama is the Museum”. An elaborate floor projection with more than a dozen Sharp NEC projectors dynamically transforms the room to match the movement of the visitors and the choice of topics on digital kiosk systems. A central concrete sculpture in the room is both a projection surface and an interaction surface. Again, the exhibition concept relies on individual content areas that harmoniously complement each other to create an overall picture. Storytelling at its best – nature, architecture, and digital create a unique visitor experience.
The project was implemented by Visionary Solutions. One of the technical requirements of the Biomuseo was that all digital signage touchpoints could be controlled centrally from a server room in the basement so that all media players and the central components were available in one place for easy service. However, since the distances to the individual touchpoints were too great, the museum was one of the first projects built on AVoverIP.
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The Panama site inspection was first published in German on invidis.de in January 2020. It is part of our invidis Classics series of exclusive stories and onsite inspections of digital signage milestone projects that haven’t lost their relevance.
