The Story Museum has dispatched Ever After, its fantastical Story Craft, on a mission to collect the 1001 greatest stories and the treasures they contain. Tales from other times and places. Told in person, on paper, on screen.

Ever After was a visitor consultation presented as an interactive exhibition, which collected information on visitors’ favourite stories through three formats: oral, written, and visual.

Visitors could record their own contributions and later download and share them. If willing they could permit the museum to use the data in their analysis.

I created a web-app which could run on multiple touch-screens in the exhibition, which all connected to a central server that stored the visitors’ contributions.

Stations invited visitors to scan their unique ticket, answer several questions about stories and make audio or video recordings about their favourite stories.

Technical details

The web-app used a bespoke PHP framework. Each station was a locked-down touch screen with a unique webpage. The recording of audio and video material made extensive use of JavaScript and HTML5 Canvas.

Via the secure admin portal, museum staff could generate QR visitor tickets in bulk. Staff could also access visitors’ answers and recordings. These could be filtered and viewed on the portal or exported in a CSV.

The server ran the main MySQL database storing QR codes and visitor data, and processed the green screen videos, using the MLT library.

The Ever After website had been built on WordPress, so I created a plugin that used cURL to connect to the Ever After server and seamlessly provide access for visitors to their audio and video files.