Attractions & entertainment: The story and the system

• Features

• 15/06/2026

When Siddharth Batla and his team at Design Factory India were commissioned to create a museum about the 2001 earthquake in Bhuj, the client handed them an 80,000 sq ft building and a brief to bring the story to life.

Eight months of research later, the content evolved and took centre stage. Batla details: “The museum turned out to be a place celebrating the resilience of the Kutchi people. We realised the earthquake was not a disaster but a natural occurrence. The museum became a place to house the story of the land and that is the story we focused on.”

The technology and ensuing work were all executed in service of the narrative. That sequencing, Batla argues, is critical. Technology is a vehicle to tell the story, and craft is what brings the two together.

This philosophy is shared by Amardeep Behl from Design Habit, who runs a practice creating experiential spaces and whose CV includes the Virasat-e-Khalsa, a landmark museum of Sikh history in Punjab, and more recently a museum on the Banjara, a nomadic tribe.

For Behl, the shift towards content-led design has clarified rather than complicated the role of technology. He says: “I have discovered that it’s not technology for technology’s sake, it is technology for impact. I’m using the ‘grace’ of technology, rather than the muscle of technology. That’s a very fine line and you can very easily get carried away.”

The distinction Behl draws, between technology as a spectacle and technology as an instrument, sits at the heart of how the museum and attractions sectors have evolved. The implications for the integrators who deploy these systems are substantial, and they run from the philosophical straight through to the practical.

What is immersion?

Mark Coxon, director of strategy and markets, XTG, AVI-SPL, argues that the narrative shift has fundamentally raised expectations for what integration has to deliver. He elaborates: “The move towards narrative means the bar for transporting the visitor has been raised. You don’t want to tell a story and not immerse somebody in it. You have to create real contrast between the digital experience somebody would have on their own screen and what you offer in the space. You have to turn the space into the set for that story.”

Thinking of the space as a set has changed how tech is deployed. Coxon describes using technology architecturally across his work: in columns, at different tiers, across floors, and on ceilings. Transparent LED can be layered in front of conventional graphics. Projection can bleed across walls and onto visitors themselves, dissolving the hard boundary between screen and room.

He says: “Maybe you need depth, so you’re using transparent LED in front of a traditional graphic or an opaque LED panel behind it. Maybe you’re painting the floor with projection. You can also talk about 3D audio, immersive smell or tactile haptics. All these elements can make you genuinely feel like you’re there experiencing the story fully.”

His central contention is that immersion is a multifaceted goal to achieve: “I don’t think any single technology is immersive on its own. It’s the application of multiple technologies together that really creates immersion and that’s an art.”

Kevin Murphy, executive advisor at Kraftwerk Living Technologies, shares Coxon’s view of technology not being an end in itself, though he extends it in a more pointed direction. For Murphy, the challenge is less about deploying more sophisticated hardware and more about what he sees as a structural failure in how many museum projects are executed.

He says: “Designers know what they want to tell as a narrative. The problem is they don’t actually know exactly what they want until you get on-site. A specification written by a consultant years before delivery, tendered to the lowest bidder, with no margin for on-site creative collaboration, produces spaces where technology and narrative exist in parallel rather than in conversation.”

Thirst for power

One technical consequence of content-led design has been a significant increase in processing demand. As visual environments grow more complex, driven by the rise of real-time engines like Unreal and Unity, and by the falling cost of fine-pitch LED, the compute burden on infrastructure has increased.

Coxon is careful to distinguish between two different modes of content delivery, each with different processing implications. He explains: “You can create everything in Unreal, render it out, and play it back as a video file and that doesn’t take any extra processing at playback. But if you’re running something truly interactive where you’re giving a visitor agency, letting them explore a 3D environment at their leisure, the engine is actually running live, then you need those resources.”

Another driver for increasing processing requirements is the density of LED itself. As fine-pitch tiles have become cost-effective at sub-1mm pixel pitches, they are covering more square footage in museum and attraction spaces and this requires more pixel processing. Coxon says: “Covering the same square footage at 0.9mm instead of 2.5mm means two and a half times more pixels, and two and a half times the processing power needed for that same piece of content.”

When that is combined with the need to simultaneously manage large-scale LED, dynamic lighting, 3D spatial audio, and complex show control cues, you can see how processing demands start to increase.

For Coxon, the solution lies in consolidated platforms that can carry multiple functions without additional rendering hardware in the chain. He says: “You want a processor that can also handle show control, manage cue files, and host the Unity or Notch files on the machine without a separate rendering PC. That’s where platforms like disguise, Pixera [from AV Stumpfl], and similar processing systems become very important; one programmable box that runs the master show.”

He is equally clear that over-specification is a genuine risk, and that it reflects a failure of client engagement: “That’s really the integrator’s responsibility, to coach the client and make sure the spec is right.”

Moving away from the hardware considerations for a moment, Murphy raises a philosophical concern about the content pipeline itself. The accessibility of AI-assisted tools is democratising content creation but is also having an impact on creative quality. He says: “Media production is being turned into a mediocre art because thousands of people think they can generate media based on AI engines. We’re seeing master plans being churned out that have no real skill except for a few words thrown into an engine. The skill is being lost.”

Processing power is not the only thing increasing in demand. As narratives and content become central, show control has become more architecturally complex. It is not uncommon to see multiple control appliances, a media server, a DSP platform, a dedicated show control system, stacked together in museum and attraction spaces. Coxon argues integrators with stronger IT backgrounds often understand how to establish a master clock at the network level and have all systems reference back to it without additional hardware.

He draws the parallel to how conference room AV has consolidated: “Could we do the same in show control and eliminate some of those stacked boxes? Probably, if you really dug into it. But that takes a level of programming and integration skill that not every integrator has or wants to take on when a known hardware stack is reliable and supportable.”

Display coexistence

The relationship between projection and LED in museum and attraction spaces has shifted considerably. The two technologies have developed distinct and increasingly well-defined roles but is there a possibility of true convergence?

Coxon sets out the practical economics: “It’s still cheaper cost-per-square-foot to do projection than LED. So, if you’re in pure efficiency mode and need to cover the maximum square footage for minimum spend, projection wins.”

But decisions are never made on economic considerations alone. Applications dictate the technology selected. Blended projector arrays introduce contrast striping and edge artifacts, particularly problematic for any content including text. Fine-pitch LED delivers seamless, high-brightness visuals with a density and contrast ratio that projection cannot match but at a cost premium that can still be two to two-and-a-half times higher especially for complex curved surfaces.

Murphy puts the point plainly: “The average visitor can’t necessarily tell the difference [between projection and LED] most of the time, so the client is spending all that extra money for something the visitor doesn’t notice. Non-educated users believe LED is the answer to everything. Commodity LED is getting cheaper, but does that make the content better? No. People are putting up screens where they shouldn’t be.”

Coxon is not opposed to the coexistence of both technologies, but he is clear that attempting to run a single continuous canvas across projection and LED simultaneously is very difficult to execute convincingly. He says: “It’s very hard to match brightness and contrast ratio as you transition off an LED panel. Even with a lot of custom calibration, you’ll always see the LED as a distinct block.”

The equilibrium for the two technologies might just be complementary but separate roles; LED as a high-definition centrepiece or architectural object and projection for depth, scale, and ambient environmental effect. Looking forward Coxon believes that LED in particular has scope to do more: “LED’s big advantage now is the flexibility of the hardware itself. You can make spheres, cubes, convex curves, concave surfaces, ribbons, genuinely sculptural pieces. Put one of those in the centre of a historic space being projection-mapped, and that’s a real opportunity.”

Behl, speaking from the design side, confirms that the integration of both technologies remains a challenge: “The first time we tried to bring them together, we actually failed. It was the harshness and darkness of the LED versus the softness of the projection. If we see them as the characters they are and create an immersive environment with them, they can work wonders.”

Small details

One area where both Coxon and Behl identify significant unrealised potential is audio. Coxon says: “In the past, if you wanted custom 3D audio, you had to know someone who specialised in it, it was a real specialist discipline. Now it’s accessible in a way it just wasn’t before.”

Today, platforms like Q-SYS offer spatial audio as a software plugin, and the toolsets for placing sound in three-dimensional space have become more widely available. And it is not just attention to audio that can make the difference. Every small detail matters. Something as simple as the choice of flooring can have a massive impact. Coxon says: “The combination of physical, tactile, audio, and visual working in tandem is what actually creates immersion. If your feet are clacking on a hollow tile floor that is reflecting the image of the jungle on the screen back at you, it just doesn’t transport you there. It doesn’t deliver immersion.”

Coxon brings the makeup of humans into the conversation and discusses how it should be factored into the visitor experience. Peripheral vision, optimised for contrast rather than detail, needs stimulation at the edges of vision. But too much stimulation and it triggers a threat response. He says: “If you want someone to actually learn and retain something, they need to be in a calm, receptive state. You can absolutely deliver a wow moment, but then you have to transition them out of high stimulation and into a mode where information actually sticks.”

The story should determine when and how those states are induced. He argues: “The story should drive the content. The content should drive the tech. The tech is just a supporting actor.”

The next generation problem

The museum and attraction sectors are currently faced with an urgent strategic question. How do you hold the attention of younger visitors for whom passive consumption is no longer sufficient?

It takes more to wow Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Behl says: “Every time we start a project, we face this problem. The younger generations figure things out in five seconds.

So how do you hold their attention?”

The answer Behl has arrived at is not more technology but more depth of experience. He continues: “The moment you add the word immersive, you’ve got the audience into a space, outdoor or indoor, and you’re working with that person’s senses. You have to make them work with sight, sound, smell, everything.”

Murphy frames the same challenge more starkly: “The problem designers have today is making the youngsters put their phone down and go, ‘wow’. But you don’t need to compete with the phone. Create experiences that are unambiguously physical. Objects that have presence, narratives that only make sense in the room, reveals that can only happen in person, organically pull attention away from competing mediums.”

Murphy continues: “You give them the ‘wow’ in front of them, and then the follow-up with information on their mobile. If we don’t solve this as a design problem, there will be no museums in 50 years because you can just learn and experience online.” For Coxon, the evolution of the museum sector is already visible in the ambition of its modern reference points. He cites the work of Meow Wolf, and Sphere in Las Vegas, as benchmarks that are actively raising visitor expectations and, by extension, raising the bar for what integration teams need to deliver. He says: “The goal is to create something that can only be experienced by stepping through that door.”

That goal, an exclusive, irreproducible, physically present experience, is what museums and attractions are reaching toward. Achieving it requires the entire chain, from creative to technology to integrator, to be genuinely aligned around the story before the first specification is written. Murphy concludes: “Technology is just a tool. If you can tell a bunch of school kids a story about how a dinosaur lived and was reconstructed, and they go ‘that's interesting’, then you’ve won.”