Interactive and Digital Experiences

The new exhibitions at the National Air and Space Museum will use creative and dynamic techniques to engage visitors while they are at the museum and after they leave. Instead of simply presenting information to visitors, the exhibitions will provide ways of engaging people through nearly 100 interactive and digital experiences. A variety of techniques and tools have also been implemented in the new galleries to make the interactives accessible to visitors with vision, hearing and mobility disabilities. 

Highlights include: 

• Walking on Other Worlds: This immersive media exhibit presents visitors with a seven-minute “tour” of seven different worlds. Using a nearly 360-degree screen, it combines real data and images from spacecraft with CGI to produce an audiovisual experience that introduces visitors to the diversity of worlds in the solar system. (“Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery”) 
• Fly the Airmail: In this decision-making activity, visitors will be faced with the same problems early airmail pilots braved when flying from New York City to Chicago. Using a touchscreen interactive, visitors will be challenged to solve the issues and successfully deliver the mail. (“America by Air”) 
• How to Get to the Moon: Through an interactive touchscreen, visitors will take on the role of a NASA engineer and decide the best method to send a person to the moon. (“Destination Moon”) 
• How to Build an Airplane: Visitors can explore various ways early designers and engineers approached the challenge of building an airplane capable of flight through animations and answering questions about the properties on a flight-worthy aircraft on a touchscreen. (“Early Flight”) 
• Fly an Early Airplane: Using touchscreen controls, visitors will be able to control an early aircraft using different early control systems, such as the Bleriot stick and rudder, Curtiss all moving wheel and the Wright Military three stick system, using a touchscreen to fly a course over water near New York City. (“Early Flight”) 
• Drive a Mars Rover: This interactive touchscreen experience challenges visitors to remotely navigate a Mars rover across the terrain through three missions. Along the way, they encounter obstacles and get to collect data. (“Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery”) 
• Take the Controls: Using a touchscreen and joystick, visitors experience what it is like to drive various vehicles at increasing speeds to learn about the difficulties of maintaining control at high speeds. (“Nation of Speed”) 
• Evel Knievel Pinball Physics: Visitors get the chance to jump a ramp just like Evel Knievel, through a pinball machine. They can experiment with the angle of the launch ramp, position of the landing ramp and pinball speed, which all come into consideration while determining the distance a daredevil can jump. (“Nation of Speed”) 
• Interactive Globe: Visitors can interact directly with the 10-foot spherical projection via six interactive kiosks that enable deeper dives into the gallery’s key themes. Each kiosk will allow visitors to pull up data visualizations on the globe itself. (“One World Connected”) 
• Flying Cars: Visitors are encouraged to think about what they would want in a flying car and learn about real flying cars. A touchscreen quiz matches them with a flying car, which they can learn more about. (“Thomas W. Haas We All Fly”) 
• There is Music in the Air: Using a touchscreen, visitors can listen to recordings of songs that show the influence of the airplane on popular culture. (“Wright Brothers & the Invention of the Aerial Age”) 

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SI-321-2022