Touchless Museum Exhibits and Trade Show Booths

A touchless exhibit is a display that visitors control with their hands in the air instead of a touchscreen or a headset. AirTouch does this with a standard RGB camera and the content you already have. Gestures become the touch, pointer, and key input your exhibit software understands, so a museum interactive, a booth demo, or a stage display becomes something people can drive by raising a hand. Nothing to wear, nothing to sanitize, nothing to hand out and collect.

Why do exhibits and booths want touchless?

• Stopping power. A visitor who waves and sees the screen respond stops. That is the whole job of a booth and most of the job of an exhibit.

• Shared surfaces. Thousands of hands a day on a touchscreen means fingerprints, wear, and a cleaning schedule. A camera has none of that.

• Scale. A touch layer on a video wall is expensive. A camera in front of one is not.

• Reach. Displays behind a case, above a barrier, or across a stage cannot be touched at all. A camera tracks through glass, within reason.

• No headsets. Headset experiences serve one person at a time, need staff, and need cleaning. The case is made in gesture control without a VR headset.

How does it work with existing content?

AirTouch runs on the computer driving the display. A camera faces where visitors stand. Hand movement becomes ordinary input, so content built for a touchscreen works with a wave, a browser exhibit works with a pointer, and a Unity, Unreal, or TouchDesigner piece receives the same events it would from a mouse. No SDK, no rebuild. Creative pipelines are on the Unity, Unreal, and TouchDesigner page, and TouchDesigner artists who lost their Kinect pipeline will want TouchDesigner hand tracking after Kinect.

How does it handle a crowd?

Crowds are the exhibit problem. Patented intent detection identifies the person who means to interact and stays with them until they finish, so people passing behind or pointing at the screen are filtered out in most setups. AutoZoom locks onto the first raised hand and follows that visitor. Proximity Trigger rests the display on an attract loop and wakes it when someone approaches. Sensor range is limited by the camera, not the software, so a visitor can interact from several meters back. The settings are in the advanced settings guide.

What do museums build with it?

• Object explorers. Rotate a scanned artifact or a specimen behind its case.

• Maps and timelines. Pan and zoom a city map or a century on a wall-sized display.

• Science interactives. Steer a particle, bend a beam, conduct an orchestra.

• Accessible interactives. A raised hand works for visitors who cannot reach a screen mounted at standing height.

What do exhibitors build with it?

• Product configurators a visitor drives from the aisle.

• Video walls that respond to a wave and reward a stop.

• Demo stations with no device to hand over, sanitize, or lose.

• Stage presentations where the presenter drives slides and 3D models from the front of the stand.

What are the limits?

Dark galleries and dramatic lighting are the usual challenge. A standard camera needs some light on the visitor's hand, and some installations may call for a specialized camera. Through our partnership with Orbbec, AirTouch also takes advantage of 3D depth sensing and IR cameras when a deployment calls for them, which is how dark rooms are handled. See the Orbbec page. Very dense crowds directly in front of the camera are worth testing at opening-day density, not at install. Camera video is processed on the exhibit computer and does not leave it.

Where to start

Contact us with the exhibit or booth plan and the content, and we will suggest camera placement and a gesture map. Designers can start a free trial and prototype on a monitor in the studio.

Related: interactive store windows that work through glass, gesture control for digital signage, gesture control for immersive displays, and gesture control and hand tracking software.