Show HN: I Built a Museum Exhibit
2 days ago
- #children-education
- #VR-design
- #museum-exhibit
- The project 'Wild Lenses' aimed to spark curiosity in children aged 6-12 about animal vision by designing a museum exhibit, with play prioritized over teaching.
- The original concept involved a periscope enclosure with a VR headset displaying filtered nature footage or live passthrough, but the final design used a Meta Quest 2 headset with arcade buttons for animal selection due to practical constraints.
- Key design iterations included improving robustness, switching from a keyboard to tactile arcade buttons, adding animal Pokemon cards for engagement, and focusing on a sturdy stand to handle children's forceful interactions.
- Playtesting revealed challenges such as confusing buttons, low text readability, and height adjustments, leading to solutions like haptic feedback, larger posters, and emergent scene-switching via double-press buttons.
- The exhibit evolved into a solo experience that fostered social behavior, with children sharing discoveries, and half the kids independently found hidden features, enhancing engagement through progressive discovery.
- Lessons included that every reachable surface becomes part of the interface, cross-domain collaboration (art, UX, engineering) was fulfilling, and unexpected outcomes like social interaction and magic in user reactions were highlights.
- The project concluded with aesthetic and structural improvements for the final exhibition, though younger, non-reading children posed new challenges, and technical notes like not covering the Quest 2 cameras were emphasized.