CASE STUDY

Museum of Exploration

Client National Geographic Society

Location Washington, D.C.

Date Completed June 2026

Overview

For the National Geographic Society's largest campus expansion in their nearly 150-year history, Trivium developed multiple interactive media experiences for three major galleries within the Society's new Museum of Exploration.

The Learning Launchpad Gallery encourages children and school groups to apply geographic thinking to concepts like Pattern, Time, Place, and Scale. Engaging an immersive floor projection, groups of visitors follow moving dots to replicate patterns of animal movement in nature. In another experience, visitors build beaver dams as part of a touchscreen game, and learn about their effects at different ecosystem scales. A physio-digital exhibit pairs exploration of images from Nat Geo’s Photo Camp program with locations on a physical map. Another experience utilizes Protobox technology to feature three Nat Geo explorers as “holograms” that speak directly to visitors and invite them into the conversation. Body tracking technology captures visitors' “votes” on questions posed by explorers via webcam.

The Learning Launchpad, located in one of the Museum’s lobby entrances, features a magical journey in which exhibit cases come alive with moving mechanical props enhanced by media displayed on transparent OLED screens. Four cases feature objects that are dedicated to the core tenets of Nat Geo's history: Exploration, Investigation, Storytelling, and Wonder. With guidance from Nat Geo's experience team, we made sure these values infused the media in every gallery.

Working with Apogee Exhibits, we developed props and custom audio scoring to create a show weaving together physical objects and animated media the OLEDs. Glass cases display objects that come to life—a bioscope arm that cranks, a helmet light that illuminates, or a textbook that opens—each concealing the complex mechanical components that animate them.

The Rolex Explorers Landing highlights Nat Geo Explorers and their fieldwork. Using touchscreen displays, visitors can learn about Nat Geo's Explorer of the Year award, including the over 5,000 awardees and the breadth of their accomplishments. Another exhibit in this gallery encourages visitors to “follow an explorer into the field” through documentary video, digital content, and physical artifacts. Touchscreen kiosks in front of each artifact case allow visitors to dive into the stories connected to each object—the explorers who use them and the research discoveries these tools have enabled. This exhibit is built to accommodate a rotating selection of featured explorers and objects. We also delivered a flexible video player platform that Nat Geo can deploy across the Museum to showcase their own extensive collection videos.

Challenges

One of Nat Geo's goals was to provide the most accessible museum experience possible. To meet this challenge we integrated tactile nav-pads across all exhibits, which provide text-to-speech content and audio descriptions of images, visuals, and video. All video players include options for multilingual captions and American Sign Language (ASL), and every exhibit features an accessibility settings panel where users can increase text size, enhance screen contrast, or dim the screen as needed.

The project also required using web-based development for ease of future program revisions and for a high level of program adaptability to different form factors across the Museum. Due to the volume of media content produced by Nat Geo for select exhibits, developing these programs on a web platform required deploying multiple levels of program and asset optimization in order to run the applications smoothly.

Approach

To achieve cohesive, consistent visitor experiences across the entire Museum while also ensuring exhibits were tailored to unique galleries, we worked closely and collaboratively with Nat Geo teams. This included concepting the more complex exhibits with NGS’s creative and user experience teams, creating infrastructure to support and display Nat Geo-produced linear media with the Impact Story Lab team, and ensuring exhibits met Nat Geo messaging goals with their education and content teams. For every interactive we developed, customization and scalability were built in through adjustable settings to adapt programs and update content.