Exhibits of The Future!(tm)

In my last post I linked to an interview on "technologies of persuasion." There's a pretty heavy advertising element to that, obviously, but it's an element I think could be used in producing history at times. Anyway, I'm bringing that up mainly because I found an example of this sort of thing the other day that could be fairly easily applied both to that concept - it is, at its heart, an advertisement - and as a neat way of presenting history that shows the kinds of things you can do with contemporary technology, a bit of creativity, and a tremendous amount of caffeine.

A few days ago, a friend of mine pointed me at a neat example of how one could present a history exhibit with modern technology in the form of this advertisement for Halo 3. What could a science-fiction FPS have to do with the presentation of history, you ask? Well, take a look at that site. It's Flash-heavy and has audio and video components for those of you whose computers may not be up to the task, but anyone with a moderately-recent machine shouldn't have a problem.

For those of you who can't (or won't) check out the URL, the basic premise of the advertisement, with all the game-setting stuff boiled out, is that it is a historical exhibit - specifically, a war diorama/memorial. It's a very large one, hence the tremendous amount of caffeine, but what's neat about this is the way it's displayed. The viewer's perspective isn't looming over the entire display, the way we tend to stand over most such exhibits in a typical museum, but it's down at the display's ground level as the camera pans and weaves through it. (That panning and weaving is largely under the user's control; you can go through it relatively freely.) That's just neat on a visual level, but what makes it especially neat, at least in my opinion, is how additional content is worked in at various points. At regular intervals in the tour through it, a link will pop up over one figurine or another. Those links lead to content which expands the context of the scene - a "first person account" in the form of a statement from Someone Who Was There on this link, a biographical sketch of another person on that one, a video of a veteran being interviewed elsewhere in the museum for another, a description of one alien baddie or another at another link, and the occasional spot where the tour pauses to allow a full panoramic view of an important location.

At first I simply looked at it thinking "well, this is certainly a damn cool piece of work" - I tend to have a healthy respect for anything that was obviously done painstakingly and well, and this is no exception to that. But after a few minutes I started thinking about it some more. This advertisement is in the form of an exhibit at a fictional museum, of course. It's an ad for a computer game, after all. But what if we got a few other people together and gave them some modern midrange hardware and software, a bit of creativity, and a tremendous amount of caffeine?

This thing isn't just an advertisement to me, although it is (at least to this semi-casual Halo fan) a pretty effective and extremely good-looking one. It is also, perhaps after one distills the game's elements out of it and looks at it on a more abstract level, a template for a pretty impressive, interactive type of exhibit in general. On top of the eye candy factor, it's a neat way of taking a diorama - normally a pretty passive sort of display, much like most things you'll see in museums - and turning it into something interactive.

If this could be made, then why not, say, a similar treatment of a diorama of Stalingrad?

Or Rome at its height?

Or 1930s New York City?

Or anything else, for that matter?