Portrait Play at the National Portrait Gallery
Interactive Digital Signage
Year 4 University Project
The project
This project asked students to explore how cultural institutions can use new web contexts to better engage their visitors and attract larger audiences. Portrait Play is a digital signage system that is designed to engage visitors at the National Portrait Gallery, through physical and playful interactions with the portraits. The project is specifically designed as a web application for large, portrait-oriented touch screens, located at the entrance of each gallery room.
The digital signage
How it works
Visitors can interact with the screens, browse the array of portraits, and select one to recreate. Once they have selected a portrait, they mimic the pose, and their self-portrait is taken after a countdown. Visitors can then add filters to make their portrait match the original as closely as possible.
The concept
This is a novel concept that moves away from traditional web technologies, by immersing visitors in the gallery experience through movement, photography and personalisation. This enables visitors to explore the gallery and become part of the collection in a playful, informal way.
The team
This project was completed as a team, and used the Scrum Framework to successfully coordinate teamwork and meet project goals. I was the product owner, oversaw the project’s design direction, wrote the initial project proposal, created the product’s styling, and contributed to the product’s development with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
