Martin and Alexandre approached Unicorn Labs with a simple vision: Enhance the learning experience of kids in museums to attract and entertain families.

Their research has shown them that museums tend to struggle when it comes to attracting youngsters to make their experience enjoyable. These two students at the University of St Gallen have thus made it their goal to tackle this problem.

Approach

It was only ideal to start with a Design Thinking workshop to allow all participants to present their ideas and bring some shape and colour to the solution. The starting point and the conditions were ideal: an idea, no starting constraints, and all of this in the Focus Terra Museum at ETH. After thorough discussion and evaluation of all proposed ideas on Post-It’s on the side of the exhibition, the consensus settled on an interactive mobile video game using live content captured with the mobile device.

The VisualZ Team then left the breeders to start working on the MVP. As the goal was to make a mobile application and work as a game, a storyboard had to be set up. And so a clear story and game flow were immediately drafted on a whiteboard. A part of the team got focused on creating a simple version as a mock-up, while the other half got started on coding the Android application. The mockup served as both a design guideline and a quick source of graphic content.

As the general frame of the application was developed and ready to be used, it was time to start working on the single games. As was decided in the Design Thinking Workshop at the very start, the goal would be to implement games like Find the Difference (where the user has to find the hidden elements we put in a painting for example) or Record Your Story (where the user records themselves explaining the art piece to the avatar in the game). Both were very interesting challenges for the Unicorn Labs team (‘the breeders’) as they required the introduction of video & photo capture, as well as image editing, within the actual game flow in the application.

Results

Finally, a stable application was ready after two extensive days of development and at the delivery some final corrections were made with Martin’s feedback. They now had all they needed to proceed with a test phase to validate their hypothesis and gather feedback for how they should continue. The application was a practical format to showcase and share their idea.

This ‘breeding’ of VisualZ’s idea into a real solution was an exciting challenge. As described above, the Design Thinking workshop was an ideal setup and allowed Unicorn Labs to witness once more the incredible value such a method can have. At this point, we wish Martin and Alexandre all the best of luck in the future with their newly acquired MVP and we will keep a close look to see the rise of this endeavour.

‍