What’s that bird?
Cornwall Park is an historic farm and park in right in the heart of NZ’s largest city, Auckland.
Seasonally changing stories
The team were looking for a way to further engage visitors and wanted to put some iPads to good use. The trouble they had (apart from not having a “big museum” budget) was that internet access* on site is patchy, at best. Their searching led them to Curio and using the free trial licence let them test it out, so they could prove it worked and build their case.
One of their displays shows the birds you can spot while in the park – and these change from season to season. Manager Rosie Coker has put her design skills to great use making a beautiful display that translates to an equally stunning hero image.
The tree display (with the iPad interactive incorporated) on the left; and the beautiful hero image using the brand patterns.
Curio Tip: note that the “highlight rings” are set to transparent - as the images of the birds are intuitive touchpoints already.
making it your own
“The back-end interface is so easy to use; easy to navigate and I like how much freedom there is in the design – I can use our brand colours and import the patterns etc – I don’t know if it could be any simpler.” Rosie Coker, Place Manager, Cornwall Park
Both the physical display and the Curio interactive are easily changed out for each season in what is proving to be a very popular display.
When highlights are selected by visitors, they can see the birds as they are in the park, and hear their birdsong (Tauhou/Silvereye on the left; Kereru/NZ Wood Pigeon on the right).
Curio Tip: note the highlights have been set to use the vertical display which suits the imagery and display orientation perfectly.
They are also using Curio to add stories to heritage photos, Rosie says “People love heritage photos and they wanted more information – this gives us the ability to do that without taking up a whole wall!”.
Visit the beautiful sanctuary, right in the city: cornwallpark.co.nz/
“We have loved the Curio customer support – it’s incredible to get such fast response, really impressive.”
[*Side note: Curio only “needs” the internet when it is powered up (while it checks it has the right version of the project), from there it can operate for visitors independently of any network. Having consistent internet does mean you get the full analytics being captured, so that’s the only downside.]
Insider Tips:
A seasoned Curio user will notice a couple of interesting things about this display. Here’s how to recreate them:
The highlights (the birds) don’t have the “Curio rings”.
That’s because they have been set to fully transparent. The highlight buttons can still be sized and placed to suit the touchpoint on your graphic, but then made invisible by using the “customise” feature. (Customise/Highlights - and then set the opacity for both selected and unselected, to 0%.The highlight panels are stacked vertically.
The image, the text, and the audio file are all stacked vertically. That’s another “customise” feature (Customise/Interactive/Content card - and then select “sidebar” instead of the usual “floating” where the highlight content pops up anywhere on the screen the highlight is, versus to one side. This particularly suits very wide screens, or screens in a portrait orientation.
Of course, you can also order the content on a content card by simply dragging the elements to the desired place, when you’re editing. That, for example, allows you to have the audio appear first, if you want to.