Shaw Family History Centre

NGX Interactive · Installation · 2019

Eight touch monitors aligned into one continuous wall, presenting the Shaw family and company history as an interactive timeline of themed and year nodes that expand on touch.

The eight-monitor timeline wall installed at the Shaw Family History Centre

Visitors interacting with the timeline wall on site

Single-monitor views of a year node expanded to an image story

Single-monitor views of a video node with the custom player controls

Attract-state landing screen on a single monitor

The wall is eight touch monitors standing side by side as one continuous surface. Visitors browse a timeline of the Shaw family's and company's history, where big theme nodes let them browse every relevant event for a year, and smaller year nodes open a single story with text and either an image or a video. I was handed the UX specs, mockups, and assets, and built the entire real-time experience in Unity.

Role

Creative Technologist

Client

NGX Interactive

Project page

Shaw Family History Centre on ngxinteractive.com

Technical Stack

Unity · multi-display · multi-touch · per-monitor audio routing · scriptable-object pipeline

Released

2019 · Installation

What I did

Built the complete real-time experience in Unity from the handed-off UX specs, mockups, and assets.
Handled multi-monitor interaction, processing multiple simultaneous touch inputs across the eight-screen wall.
Routed audio per monitor, so a video opened on screen #5 played out of that screen, by remapping the video's audio channels to the target display and assigning each screen its own camera listening to predetermined channels.
Wrote a custom video player with a scrubbable progress bar, volume, and play/pause controls.
Authored the animation layer: nodes opening, media opening, year-to-year browsing, and idle attract states.
Built a data pipeline that converted a spreadsheet of 200+ nodes into Unity scriptable objects, so content edits were made in an external file and ported in without rebuilding the project.

Constraints

Eight-monitor wall treated as one continuous, synchronized surface.
Simultaneous multi-touch across all screens at once.
Audio had to localize to the monitor the visitor was interacting with.
Massive content set, 200+ nodes with per-event text and media, that had to stay editable by non-engineers.
Developed and verified against a single test screen, since I was not part of the on-site venue setup.

What shipped

A synchronized eight-display timeline wall with simultaneous multi-touch interaction.
Per-monitor audio routing driven by per-screen cameras listening on dedicated channels.
A reusable custom video player with full transport controls.
A content pipeline converting external spreadsheet data into scriptable objects for fast, build-free updates.
A full animation set for nodes, media, timeline navigation, and idle attract loops.