Digital Works Podcast

This is how we built...an interactive longbow exhibit

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Ben Templeton is a writer, creative director and facilitator in the field of games and playful technology. For almost 20 years Ben has helped organisations around the world create fun ways of bringing audiences together to interact with art, culture and science.

The Robin Hood Experience at Nottingham Castle is a series of immersive arcade games in four renovated coach arches. Supported by real-time motion tracking, custom electronics and large screen projections, players can grab an authentic medieval weapon and test their skills against a range of challenges. In the longbow games, three players compete for the high score but the quarterstaff is a solo battle against Little John on the bridge.

This is how we built… shares the honest stories behind digital projects in the cultural sector, exploring what sparked them, how they were delivered (and what they cost), what nearly went (or did go) wrong, an the lessons learned along the way.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to This Is How We Built, a short series of digital works, digging into the real stories behind digital projects in the cultural sector. Each episode is about 20 minutes, covering the ideas, the costs, the surprises and the lessons learned. I'm Ashman, a consultant who works with cultural organizations on digital strategy and initiatives. And I hope you find these conversations honest, practical, and useful. Okay, let's go. Today we'll hear from Ben Templeton. Ben is a creative director who works with cultural organizations to make games and playful digital experiences. And we're going to go behind the scenes of an interactive longbow exhibition at Nottingham Castle that Ben and his team worked on. We'll hear about the importance of prototyping, the difficulties of diagnostics, and to beware of the carbon fibre microdust. Ben, what was the original idea?

SPEAKER_00:

I think it all would have started more than 10 years ago. The Nottingham Council wanted to relaunch the castle as a modern tourist attraction. And the castle historically is quite underwhelming. It's firstly, it's not a castle, and secondly, they're not really telling the Robin Hood story anywhere near as well as Hollywood. So they wanted to give a much more authentic, compelling experience. They wanted to tell the story of medieval archery and how important that is in sort of British history. And they wanted to show that these weapons, the longbow and the quarter staff, were part of everyday life. So, you know, men and children over 10 had to practice each week. And the quarter staff is essentially a long bit of wood that peasants had access to. And peasants used it to herd their geese or knock acorns out of trees, but they also used it to fight rich people. And with this project, who were you working with? Who was involved? So Nottingham Council was the primary client, and they handed operations over to Nottingham Castle Trust at launch. But in the early days, that sort of team there, Ben Gammon was running content and Cal Warren was project lead, but Cass and Mann were the exhibition designer, involved with the kind of heritage lottery funding section of it. And then we came on board. I was creative director at Preloaded, who are a game studio. And then as part of the production of our section of the exhibition, we brought on board artists and engineers who are an amazing small team. They specialise in electronics. And then we also brought on board MDM Props, who are a fabulous fabrication team. They've got an amazing warehouse down in Greenwich, which was just a real thrill to have such professionals on board. They make all the stage shows for the West End, and yeah, they make incredible physical props.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm always fascinated with projects like this, which involve you know experience design, making stuff, software, content. How did you go about it?

SPEAKER_00:

So the brief, there were four old coach arches in the car park, and essentially they created a new exhibition space enclosing those four arches. And the content team wanted some longbow and some quarter staff experiences. So the first thing we did really was to research those games. A lot of it was about archery. Archery is the sort of more high profile of the two weapons. And we just got really excited about this one chap in particular who became famous on YouTube for the sort of speed and dexterity with which he could shoot arrows, you know, running and backflipping, or riding a motorcycle, or doing two shots, or like shooting his own arrow at himself. And all this kind of became our North Star. We really wanted a fluid, physical, untethered experience. And that was our North Star, really. We fought quite hard for the bows not to be bolted down. The original exhibition design from Casaman talked about the longbows being bolted to tables, which I understand is sensible. The fewer moving parts means for a more robust experience. But our vision was to try and make the four arches cohere from a user experience perspective. And to do that, we needed a framework behind it. So that's not just a visual framework, but also technically. So we wanted to use technology that would work for both the weapon types across the four arches. And really the most important starting point was settling on how are we going to track these weapons as they move in space. And so the screen-based stuff is all Unity. So we had a sort of an aesthetic for the world that we wanted to create, this medieval world. So there were four screens, one in each archway. That was all Unity-based. And then we had a motion tracking system from Opti-Track. So in each arch there were some infrared cameras mounted. That would mean that on each of the weapons we needed to mount lots of reflective markers. And there was only one quarter staff in each of the quarter staff arches, but in the longbow arches, we had three, three bows in each of the longbow arches. And so tracking three different longbows as they move is quite challenging. And we we designed a system for creating different patterns of reflective markers on each bow so that the system could distinguish between them. I mean, we did a huge amount of physical prototyping. Really, that's how we got to the point of what feels like a really playable experience is just mucking around with physical stuff. It started with cellotaping two dog ball throwers together to get the feel of a bow. Then we got this amazing first prototype off MDM props. They welded some steel together in a curve, and it was really rudimentary and far too heavy, but gave us a quick sense of the physicality of this experience. And then we moved on to a sort of a fiberglass construction for the longbows. And its final state is still fiberglass, but covered in black electrical tape because of all the dinks and drops of kids throwing it on the ground.

SPEAKER_01:

We'll come back to the kids throwing it on the ground when we talk about maintenance. But you know, you talked a lot about prototyping there, fabrication, software design, technology. How long did this project take to put together? And if you can share, what did it cost?

SPEAKER_00:

So the broader project was part of a£35 million sort of heritage lottery fund capital project, and our piece of the puzzle was those four old coach arches to make these arcade-style games. The production was around 12 months, and the budget was around£200,000. But the lockdown slightly changed things, and we'll come to that. That was probably one of the biggest surprises.

SPEAKER_01:

So, on the subject of surprises, what did catch you unawares? What surprised you along the way?

SPEAKER_00:

Lockdown was a nasty surprise. It's really hard to prototype a physical interactive when you can't be in the same room as each other. We couldn't visit the site very often, and consequently, the quarter staff experience is not quite as fluid and as intuitive as I had hoped. It follows the kind of guitar hero, dance hero thing where there are patterns that you have to follow because we didn't want kids just smashing each other with quarter stars. So we tried to structure it with, you know, provide game world scaffolding. But beyond lockdown, we found workarounds for that. I was actually really surprised with how the pitch vision transitioned into production. And I don't want to kind of blow my own trumpet. It wasn't me, it was the whole team at pitch stage created what was a really simple pitch, and we could take that simple concept and it ran right through. And we did all the hard work up front in a way by thinking yes, we needed a standardized technical approach, a standardized visual approach, a standardized game design system. And so that was really pleasing to often there's a big pivot from pitch stage to production. I'm also surprised how quickly we got a playable version of the game. So we had to use mobile phones and the accelerometers in the phones to give that impression of a physical object, but we could direct the arrow in different directions on the screen using the accelerometer and it and it very quickly felt quite fun. I mean, the the more interesting surprises came after launch, really. There were lots of technical surprises, and just one quick example is to do with machine tolerance. And I talked about how we distinguished between the different longbows in each arch. So we had three players, and we needed to create this pattern system for the markers on each bow. And just the slight difference in machine tolerance around where it drilled the holes created a real problem for us. And boring things like threaded nylon rod, you know, when the thread is like a tiny gauge different, it pulls out. And so the kind of physicality was new for me, coming primarily from a software background. So it was it was a real treat to work in that physical space.

SPEAKER_01:

That's something that I've heard in other conversations for this series that when it comes to making things, the tooling and the machining and the fabrication suddenly unlocks a door to a room you didn't even know existed. Exactly. You've already talked a lot about there, there were prototypes, there was mucking around, as you say, there was sort of electrical tape, you know, you're dealing with lockdown, you're dealing with doing and playing with new ideas and new technologies. What didn't work, or maybe nearly went off the rails while you were going through this project?

SPEAKER_00:

I feel like there were endless missteps, sort of micro missteps, just in production, miscommunications. That sort of feels par for the course. But the most complex thing was the sequencing of the hardware, the physical sort of chain of hardware. We had the longbows themselves, which were tethered into the setworks, and the other side of the setworks they fed into an interface box, and that interface box then fed back to the server room, which sort of fed to the screen that the player actually sees. And just troubleshooting along that chain was really difficult, and we didn't have all of the tooling up front that we would have needed. It's quite difficult to plan for the tools that you need, and they're also building tools, establishing more efficient workflows, is costly. And so when you're on a tight budget, you need to kind of plow ahead as quickly as possible. So that complex sequencing of kit was really difficult, and it came down to boring things like naming conventions. So we used to call them interface boxes, and that became a real mouthful when you're trying to shout down a bad phone line with no reception. So now we call them Z boxes, and there are cassettes, which is the electronics that sit inside the long bow, and they all have like ID numbers. So they're C, and we have arrows which are A. And it took a while to kind of establish these naming conventions. And the bows themselves needed ID numbers because certain ones would be dropped and swapped in. And even just adding an ID number to the bow was so much harder than you'd realize because every element of the bow can be sort of taken off. And it's that sort of philosophical problem: when does the ship remain, you know, that Egyptian guy's ship? If you change one plank of wood, is it still the same ship? But if you change every single plank of wood, is it still the same ship? So we had a lot of problems on those silly, small scale. In terms of other things, like the original idea of bolting the longbows to the table, we felt was a bad one, just from an authentic visitor experience perspective. It that's not what archery is like. The thrill of a longbow is that you can wield it in any direction. Think of Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games and how quickly she can kind of fire off an arrow. So, really, that was a vision passed on to us from the designers, and this is not to talk them down. Casaman did an amazing job, but that was one of the failings, I think, to think of it in terms of everything having to be bolted down. Yeah, we encountered a few road sort of bumps in the road persuading them to think about it differently, and I'm so pleased that we persevered. Just a quick note on carbon fibre. We thought that would be the right material to use for structural strength, but actually it created through wear and tear, it created this fine particles of carbon, which became magnetized, which then sent all of our sensors awry. And it took us so long to work out why are the readings all over the place, and it's because of this micro dust. So then we swapped to plastic arrows and they shattered very quickly with all the impacts, and now we're on nylon arrows, which are holding up really well. So, yeah, there was some physical failings, but I'd like to just sort of credit and pay testament to the Castle team for persevering with these design cycles where we could work iteratively, and that all happened after launch. And I think the continuous iteration that we've done through the maintenance period and beyond is really interesting, and maybe we can talk a bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I mean it sounds already that there were so many lessons coming out of almost every aspect of this project.

SPEAKER_00:

But what are the big things that you feel like you learned? It's easy to say keep it simple. But in this project, I really saw how powerful that principle is, and it's very hard to keep it simple. It's very easy to say that. And I found that the framework we created in pursuing that simplicity of an overarching technical approach, an overarching visual framework, trying to use the same game design principles across two very different interactives. As I said, it was painful at first, but I think that really paid off. So I'm really pleased that we persevered with that simplicity of approach. The other thing around simplicity is that people play what they know, and we didn't need to innovate in the gameplay. Shooting a bow and arrow is already really fun. Wielding, you know, a six-foot quarter staff is inherently quite fun. So we had to be quite restrained with the game design. And there were some missteps there in over-engineering the complexity of the gameplay, and actually just shooting at moving targets rather than static targets was enough of an elevation for you know level two. And I think it was lovely to look back on the games and feel the reward of having been restrained. So that restraint was quite important. I think it's so important to invest in people, and that came down to the training. So we did on-site training with the staff, but of course, staff move on, and we had to sort of provide subsequent training. That was really quite difficult, enabling the on-site team to do some of the low-level maintenance because the off-site maintenance, the electronics, is a lot more expensive, and so bringing an outsourced team in to help is an expensive solution. So we really wanted to enable the people to look after it themselves. And I guess the final thing is just around the iterative nature of the project and how we got to support the project over time. We we were very quick to find something playable, and then when it came to fixing those hardware issues I spoke about, we quickly 3D printed new solutions, we sent them up to the castle, try these out, take a photo. Yeah, that one exploded. Okay, great. Let's do it in a different way. But the team at the castle were amazingly patient with that process, and I actually really enjoyed it. And we've gone through five or six design iterations on the physical setup over the last few years. And I have never in 20 years in the industry had that experience of such a long-running project. And I feel like we're adding value to it as we go, and it's a real treat to be involved for such a long period of time.

SPEAKER_01:

And on that question of things that have happened since launch, what do you feel has worked and maybe what hasn't?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's really hard for staff on the ground to support this interactive, partly because 30 children will come screaming in and just pick everything up and chuck everything around and pull things. So the tethers pull out of the wall. And I mean, the main job for staff is to untangle the tethers, which is so boring. Um, stock control was a total nightmare. We've tried physical whiteboards and taking photos of them, digital whiteboards, spreadsheets, emails, WhatsApp. There's simply too many components to track in such fine detail. So we've slightly softened our approach. The anal part of me wanted to audit exactly where every component was at every point in time, whether it's in London or Nottingham or in the stockroom or on the floor, but that wasn't practical. And the stuff that really has worked is that continuous iteration, which is incredibly rare. So tackling the weak points in that chain of hardware one by one. And firstly, we did a big round of re-engineering to make it much quicker to service, turning what was essentially prototype electronics, where each connection was like manually soldered. We created a cassette with plugs that could slide in and out of the longbow. And we just couldn't afford to do that in the first iteration. But being able to create these cassettes that can then be posted, and that saves on postage costs. Early days we had to send the entire longbow to London for us to work on it, and now we can just send a cassette. So that was fantastic. And the arrows, as I said, we had that issue with the carbon fiber dust. We iterated and went to plastic and went to nylon. And it's really nice to have a working relationship with the castle where we can, as part of our maintenance contract, we can send up a new component and see how it works on the floor.

SPEAKER_01:

And finally, for anyone listening to this and maybe thinking about doing their own interactive longbow or you know, any interactive that sort of has this big physical component part. What's your advice for someone thinking about doing something similar?

SPEAKER_00:

I guess the problem with advice is it's dished out with rose-tinted glasses on. And budgets are always tight, people are always stressed. And having something as exciting as this to work on feels like quite a rare gem. But in general, even on small interactive projects, I think I would suggest you stay in the low fidelity world as long as possible. And that means keep things rough, the prototypes, keep things in sketch world as long as possible. And as soon as you start polishing, it becomes very hard to adjust and move. And I think no matter how experienced the team are, you need to allow space for changes. And the cheapest way to do that is to stay low fidelity for as long as possible. And in user testing, audience members are perfectly happy to use their imaginations and to flesh things out. So stay low fidelity. It's a bit boring, but plan for servicing. The logistics of that, the on-the-ground reality of servicing things like this does need planning for. But to end on a more positive note, I think if you can imagine it, it really is possible. I think the ambition at that early stage is so important. So for us to really stick to our guns on this being a free-moving bow, not bolted to the setworks, might have felt like a pipe dream. Indeed, we had many discussions in the early days, and it was felt to be impossible, but we actually made it happen by sticking to our guns. So I think if you can keep it simple in the areas that you can control, then you can go big with that one sort of ambitious piece. And I suppose a final practical note would be the value of tools and tooling. So this is about dashboards and things for reading out the status. And after launch, we created a little web app that allowed us remotely to check on the status of the different items of hardware in that sequence. And it was just a revelation. It meant we were no longer getting the team to sort of send screenshots and photos with the torch highlighting these obscure LEDs. It was um a real revelation. So building those tools as you go is important, and that costs money and takes investment. So I think if you prioritize it early, you will save yourselves pain down the line. And on that note, Ben, thank you so much. Thanks, Ash.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more, you can find all episodes of the podcast on thedigital.works. And if your organization needs help making sense of digital, you can get in touch with me via my website at Ashman.co. That's man with two ends. See you next time.

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Ash Mann

Host