Leadership Reimagined Experience

THE CHALLENGE

In 2018, we were engaged by Northern Star Scouting Base Camp to create an interactive leadership experience for their new Leadership Center in St Paul, Minnesota.

Together, we merged Northern Star Scouting’s rich leadership curriculum and new classroom programs with immersive technologies to engage today’s younger, tech-savvy generations.

THE EXPERIENCE

We paired the new Leadership Center curriculum with dynamic content, resulting in the Leadership Portal room, an immersive theater with interactive gaming and panoramic storytelling.

We designed both an introductory leadership video to prepare students for a “different kind of day” and a multi-chapter mystery-adventure storyline. Our content simulates how to use several leadership skills and styles within a group; decisiveness, patience, collaboration, balance, diplomacy, integrity, analysis, and passion.

We custom designed the room and technology to best immerse user’s in the experience. Laser projectors created an edge-to-edge 360-degree canvas on 18 foot walls, allowing a unique storytelling medium for panoramic animations. A 9 foot wide multitouch table supplied by Ideum facilitates interactions and gameplay.

Several interactive features were required to bring our vision to life:

• Touch-based user interface design for game controls, guide controls, menus, and scene navigation
• 4 puzzles designed for 4-8 players collaborating
• Gamification elements such as real-time difficulty adjustments, group tracking, score and badge awards, and re-playability
• Procedurally animated “artificial intelligence” character created using Amazon Web Services’ Amazon Polly, a powerful and humanlike text-to-speech synthesizer.
• Over 20 panoramic video cutscenes
• Stylized character animation
• Mid-action photos captured through USB web cameras for social sharing
• Dynamically controlled LED lights for special effects
• Spatialized audio enhances the content’s depth
• Visualization of national and historic leaders, as well as state leaders from Minnesota
• Networked room controller to provide hardware controls, conserve energy, and ensure long operation life of the technology.

Through the design process, we prototyped and playtested to ensure strong usability. We brought in a local Dallas Explorer Post (with both boy and girl participants) and Boy Scouts of America board members for several rounds of play testing and feedback to ensure the game was fun to play, intuitive to use, and impactful at executing curriculum goals.

We installed and tuned the experience on-site, providing training to Northern Star Scouting Base Camp staff and volunteers.

THE RESULTS

The final result was an interactive and immersive experience with 4 individual adventures that gave our client the “sizzle on the steak” they were looking for to enhance their new leadership training programs. The experience was built with scalability in mind for future expansion to include additional educational content that further supports Northern Star Scouting’s curriculum.