Cape Breton Miners Museum

The Cape Breton Miners Museum preserves and interprets the region’s long coal-mining history. Visitors can explore exhibits on the geological development of Cape Breton’s coalfield, mining techniques, tools, and labor history, along with the Miners’ Village that recreates a company store and home from the 1850–1900 period. One of the museum’s standout experiences is the underground Ocean Deeps Colliery tour, often led by retired miners, which gives a vivid sense of what coal mining was like in the region.

In 2024, the museum underwent a refresh. EDM was commissioned by Aldrich Pears and Skyline Atlantic to develop two feature digital interactives, the Miners Memorial and the Energy Illuminated wall. As you’ll read below, these are very different experiences, both in tone and in implementation. This is what makes museum work so exciting.

Miners Memorial

In the years from 1866-1988, more than a thousand men died in the coal mines of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. The causes were many: explosion; rock falls; runaway rake cars; miner’s lung. In an alcove adjacent to the museum lobby protected by a vitrine sits the Miner’s Memorial Book, a volume containing the names of miners who lost their lives to coal mining. As the book is an artifact, it cannot be directly handled by visitors. The museum wanted to make its contents accessible to visitors. EDM’s Miners Memorial digital interactive does this in a way that is suitably respectful of the miners and their families.

A young visitor browsing the digital Miners Memorial book. In the background, the slow scroll of 1000+ names repeats throughout the day.

Visitors can interact with the digital book in a number of ways:

• using a page turn gesture on the touchscreen
• with more traditional backwards and forwards buttons
• scrolling to a different year with the drop-down “bookmark”
• using the provided keyboard to search for a name

Not infrequently, a visitor is a direct descendent of a coal miner whose name appears in the book. A virtual keyboard with dynamic search allows them to quickly and easily locate the miner in question, and jump to this page in the memorial book. Additionally, the constant scroll of names that is projected behind the exhibit pauses briefly, and the searched-for miner is highlighted as a momentary tribute.

Energy Illuminated

“Energy Illuminated” is an immersive digital experience that lets visitors explore the past and future of Nova Scotia energy production. Designed primarily for children (and the young at heart), visitors don a mining helmet whose virtual headlamp reveals an animated scene beneath the projected rock face. Visitors can explore individually or collaborate to reveal larger vignettes. The experience is one of playful discovery. No staff facilitation is required.

An animated attract screen provides simple instructions: pick up a mining helmet and explore

The short video below is representative of the experience. The visitor grabs a mining helmet from the rack and puts it on. Within seconds a spotlight appears on the wall. Moving their head, the visitor realizes that the light seems to emanate from their own helmet. They quickly intuit that the spotlight is revealing an animated cityscape behind the rock face.

Tracking is highly responsive. The illusion is so convincing that visitors have been observed shining their phone flashlights onto the exhibit, believing it will pierce the rock. This is a great example of technology being leveraged to create a sense of wonder in the visitor. The device on the helmet is a virtual-reality VIVE tracker. In conjunction with beacons placed around the exhibit periphery, EDM is able to precisely determine the tracker’s location and orientation in space. From there we can compute what a virtual spotlight would generate on the projected screen. The following short video illustrates the accuracy of the VR trackers: we overlay the digital headlamps with actual footage of visitors using the exhibit as observed through our remote monitoring camera.

An exhibit like Energy Illuminated is the culmination of a thousand hours of collaborative design and production.

Skyline and EDM built a centimetre-accurate digital model of the base building. This allowed us to find a workable screen layout and projector configuration in extremely tight quarters. It even identified sprinkler pipes and a heater unit that needed moving in advance, streamlining the audio-visual install.

On the content side, it was a pleasure developing the underlying animated vignettes. This was an iterative collaboration between EDM, exhibit designers Aldrich Pears, and the museum itself. The three screens portray different aspects of Nova Scotia’s energy history: worker skills; community; and historical transitions. The following short video loop includes excepts from each of the three screens. Remember that visitors never see these fully revealed … only through the elliptical revealing spotlight of their virtual headlamp.

The VIVE VR trackers needed a custom mount to the mining helmets. EDM designed and fabricated these mounts, prototyping first with 3d printing, and later milling them from Delrin on our 4th axis CNC.

If you have the opportunity to visit beautiful Cape Breton, set aside time to visit the Miners Museum in Glace Bay.