Housed in a custom-built, portable structure on the Lower Manhattan waterfront, the experience was attended by over 50,000 people during a three week period, the MUSEUM OF FEELINGS became a must-see attraction during the busy holiday season, generating 1000s of social media impressions.
Each of the five main Experience Spaces and immersive installations was designed around a particular Glade candle fragrance and a corresponding emotion and color theme.
Experience Room 1 —
Optimism (Berry / Red)
➔ Responsive Sound & Light Installations
➔ Interactive Scent Beacons
As visitors first entered the MUSEUM OF FEELINGS, they moved through an Entrance Tunnel — a transistional moment and sensory palette cleanser from the outside world that prepares them for the rich immersive experience to follow.
A custom designed array of lights and first-surface mirror built into a narrow recess of the entrance tunnel created a visual surprise of colorful and vibrant stereo shadows. fragmenting visitors silhouettes into multiple color shapes — this analog responsive installation invited visitors to play and interact as they waited to enter the first experience space.
These multi-colored representations subconsciously foreshadowed the five color themes of the Museum experience.
Visitors passed through a series of custom shaped curtains - arranged in a ascending curves of onion-skin-like layers washed in colorful light.
As they passed through the curtain tunnel the light hue seemlessly shifted from a soft purple/indigo to a vibrant berry pink/red, creating a sense of pleasurable disorientation and dramatic entrance for the first space.
Visitors exited the curtain tunnel into a pure pink and rose-colored room filled with brilliant dancing light shapes.
Multiple sculptural elements acted as interactive totems — reflecting and refracting prismatic light within the space.
These 'Scent beacons' released the room fragrance when visitors triggered them via a hidden proximity sensor.
Visitors were given a small reflective scented card that allowed them to playfully interact with the focused beams of light within the space.
By interupting the beams of light with their reflector cards they triggered the subtle release of the scent and locallized ambient sound design elements to be played from audio spotlights directly above.
Experience Room 2 —
Joyful (Winter Pine / Green)
➔ Immersive / Responsive Light Sculpture
➔ Immersive Infinity Mirror Room
➔ Interactive Scent Beacons
A Joyful 'Forest' composed of over 48,000 twinkling fiber optic lightstrands – A responsive sculptural environment made of sparkling and pulsing light that evoked the sensation of stepping inside a magical holiday moment.
The mirrored infinity walls and a highly reflective floor created the illusion of the sparkling filiaments of light disappearing into the distance as if lost within an endless forest of twinkling green light.
A custom app drove a series of idle-state animations that slowly moved through the array of fiber optics – giving the perception that the forest was ever-changing in shape and depth.
Intriguing geometric 'lantern-like' objects were strategically place just off the forest path, pulsing and glowing, inviting visitors to move into the fibers and explore.
Each of these latterns was a interactive 'Scent Beacon' that reacted as the visitor approached, responsively releasing subtle notes of balsam and fir tree fragrance.
Responsive LED patterns from within the Beacon became excitied by visitor proximity and triggered twinkling pulses of light to emanate out through the immeadiately adjacent fibers in the forest.
Experience Room 3 —
Invigorated (Blue)
➔ Responsive 'Energy Halo' Projections
➔ Generative Animations
A visitors entered the irregular-geometric-shaped room, dynamically pulsing and rotating 'Energy Halos' were created on the floor surrounding their feet.
These procedurally generated animations playfully tracked and responded to visitors motions as they moved through the space.
No two 'Halos' were them same, following a set of creation rules, a custom Processing app generated realtime dancing rings of light unique to each visitor. As they began to spin or dance more energetically the Halo rings responded by changing in frequency and amplitude — becoming more excited and colorful - radiating and pulsing outward.
At the entrance to the space, visitors were given special spectral glasses that perceptually seperated the RGB values of the dancing halos — making the animating rings appear to lift off of the floor into the space around them.
In the far corner of the space a glowing geometric sculptural element apeared to grow out of the wall.
As visitors approached this slowly pulsing 'Scent Beacon', their Halo would react and go into an animation frenzy, triggering the release of a Citrus fragrance, LED animations, and a locallized sound design layer from an audio spotlight above.
When they were standing directly in front of the Scent Beacon they felt the physical invigoration of standing on top of a haptic sub speaker hidden in the floor below.
Experience Room 4 —
Exhilarated (Floral/Pink)
➔ Immersive Floral Kaleidoscope
➔ Generative Flower Animations
➔ Interactive Audio-Visual Mirrors
In the fourth immersive space, visitors stepped into an exhilarating, magical and disorienting mirror faceted world of pink rotating kaliedoscopic floral transformations.
Bright pink Peoney and white Cherry Blossoms bloomed, twirled and multiplied - their reflections spliting apart across dozens of facets around and above.
Based on a 3-6-12 point geometry, the triangular mirrored facets were all carefully designed to have incident angles that maximized the number of kaliedoscopic iterations and amplified the sensation of flowers repeating into infinity, while also reducing the possibility of visitors just seeing their own reflections.
The complete reflective coverage of every surface and a seamless black mirror floor amplified the effect of being completely immersed inside a magical and psychedelic floral experience.
Within the central mirrored column, three interactive touchscreens allowed visitors to control the speed and geometry of the floral animations and reflections.
Developed in collaboration with a team from the LAB at RockwellGroup, this application added a playful interactive layer that delighted and further engaged visitors.
Experience Room 5 —
Calm (Lavender)
➔ Immersive Cloud Room
➔ Ambient Sound & Light Installation
As a final sensory experience visitors entered a peaceful and meditative space.
A circular room with no corners or hard edges, every part of it was designed to enable a lighting design program that bathed the room in a soft lavender glow.
The floor was completely hidden beneath a perpetual standing layer of slowly undulating white fog just below the knees, giving the visitor the sensation of walking in the clouds. A custom composed spatial audio 'sound bath' further immersed visitors in a deep sense of ambient calm as they moved within the edgeless space.
The custom sound design in the space used a bed of low whitenoise and ambient synth pads mixed with overlapping recordings of Tibetan singing bowls and chimes that drifted in and out, creating an endless and calming meditative tone within the room.
Experience Room 6 —
Interactive Brand Space
➔ Retail Space Design
➔ Responsive Scent Installation
Visitors exited the experience through a custom designed retail space.
A simple modern white space with soft light and accents of projected color that directed the focus to the product display and a central interactive table.
The center piece of the retail space was a large interactive 'Scent Table'. Illuminated by responsive animations projected from above, the table featured ten individual fragrances, released from smooth white corian 'bowls' in the sureface when visitors leaned in.
When the visitor approached each scent position, concentric circle animations around the bowl came to life, revealling the olfactory notes associated with that fragrance.
The table gave visitors an opportunity to experience the fragrances up close in an novel and tactile way.
Custom premium Glade Scented Candle packaging was designed and produced just for the experience — becoming a unique souvenir for the experience while also elevating the perception of the Glade product.
UGC / SocialMedia Activation —
Interactive 'Mood' Kiosks'
➔ Retail Space Design
➔ Responsive Scent Installation
At a series of interactive kiosks in the Retail Space, visitors were invited to create their own 'Mood' portraits. By placing their hand on a custom built sensor that measured pulse, skin temperature and GSR, the kiosk 'interperted' the visitors current 'mood' and used the resulting data to generate an individuallized filter and shader effect on a portrait taken at the same moment.
These 'Mood-Lens' portraits were then printed onto spaecial scented paper that coresponded with the mood result - becoming a unique physical momento of the experience and sharable digital asset. Images from the Kiosk Mood Gallery and realtime mood dataviz were projected onto a large 'feature wall' within the retail space - providing a snapshot of the emotional state of the Museum visitors and online participants.
Exterior Experience —
Mood Ring of the City
➔ Custom Realtime Data-Driven Program
➔ Responsive Architechtural Light Installation
The Museum of Feelings structure featured a 'living facade' that changes to reflect the mood of the city. The white surface of the structure exterior became a large and highly-visable canvas for ever-changing ambient washes of color that slowly shifted and blended together into beautiful gradients.
Powered by a custom algorithm, the building exterior became a site-specific installation in its own right, mirroring the mood of New York City as expressed through social media and currated live data seed sources.
As the local weather or stock markets fluctuated so did the 'mood' value and color of the building in realtime.
