EDM developed this intuitive museum-quality photo mosaic browser for the lobby of the acclaimed Capitol Theatre.
The Capitol Theatre in downtown Moncton, New Brunswick, is a restored 1920s Italianate vaudeville house and opera-style auditorium that now serves as one of Atlantic Canada’s key bilingual performing arts centres. Designated a local and provincial historic place, it is Moncton’s oldest surviving theatre and one of only a handful of fully restored vaudeville-era theatres in Canada. The Capitol Theatre features a 782-seat main hall, the more intimate Empress Theatre, and an art gallery that together anchor the region’s cultural life
Project Scope
As part of a renovation led by Skyline Atlantic, EDM Studio was commissioned to design and produce a feature kiosk interactive for the Capitol Theatre lobby. The kiosk was to sit opposite a large framed image of the theatre. This image is actually a photo mosaic comprised of thousands of individual images of the many performers who have graced the Capitol Theatre stage.
EDM’s task was to create a digital interactive that enabled visitors to explore the mosaic. The brief required:
- Easy to use for visitors of all ages
- Let visitors browse the mosaic, with fluid panning and zooming to see constituent tiles not easily visible from the staircase
- Support expected multitouch pinch/expand gestures for zoom
- Search for artists in the mosaic
- Show the underlying high-resolution images of a chosen artist/tile
- Provide content in both English and French
Functional Design
The following gallery contains a selection of screenshots from the functional design document. This simple mockup is beneficial because it focuses on what the interactive does rather than how it looks. It provides a concrete reference for the client to review early in the process … well before precious resources are spent on polished visuals or actual software.
The first screen the visitor encounters shows the fullscreen mosaic.
Pop-ups offer the visitor tips on using the interactive.
Zooming in reveals individual mosaic photos. The red rectangle in the navigator indicates the amount and location of the zoom.
While zoomed in, visitor can use multi-touch gestures. The red rectangle in Navigator can be moved to update the mosaic.
Touching a particular tile brings up a detailed photo and information about the artist.
A scrollable list allows visitors to quickly find an artist of interest.
This static functional design will frequently be used to create an “alpha” version of the software – a minimally viable digital interactive that can be tested by representative visitors. In our case, testing happened here at EDM in Vancouver.
Final Software
The following gallery contains screenshots from the polished interactive. A slowly evolving attract screen invites the visitor to touch the interactive in both official languages. Thereafter, the entire mosaic is shown along with intuitive pan/zoom navigational controls. Pop-up tips encourage the visitor to explore: for example, by dragging the navigator rectangle or clicking on a specific tile.
Untouched, a slowly evolving attract screen invites the visitor to touch.
Touching the screen shows the full photo mosaic. The Navigator at bottom-right allows visitors to zoom and pan.
Here we’ve zoomed in slightly.
Visitors can brows the drop-down list to select an artist. As an example, let’s choose famed Canadian comedian Rick Mercer.
Tiles containing Rick Mercer’s image are highlighted.
Clicking on any one of these highlighted tiles brings up a high-res image of Rick on the Capitol Theatre stage.
Showing all tiles for artist Ariane Moffatt
High-res image of Ariane Moffatt’s mosaic tile.
EDM’s photo mosaic explorer is available for use on other projects. If you have an interesting project that could make use of this technology, please don’t hesitate to reach out.