Client: Qatar National Library (QNL)
Role: Lead Development Engineer – Interactive Experiences
Technology: Unity 3D, C#, GitHub, Figma
Keywords: 2D, Touchscreen, Interactive Exhibition, Football History
As Lead Development Engineer for the Goaaal! How Football Kicked off in Qatar exhibition at Qatar National Library, I developed four distinct interactive experiences that allowed visitors to explore Qatar's football history in innovative and immersive ways. The project, showcased on 10 large touchscreens, was designed to be fully interactive, offering users a chance to actively engage with the content instead of simply consuming it passively. Each of the experiences was crafted to encourage exploration, learning, and discovery.
Key Interactive Experiences and Features:
Immersive 3D Timeline
The spherical 3D timeline was designed to allow users to rotate and navigate through time. Visitors could interact by dragging the screen to move along the timeline, triggering landmark moments in Qatar’s football history. By selecting specific dates, users were shown archival images, videos, and historical information. Each date featured interactive elements like text boxes that expanded upon touch and clickable media assets, creating a dynamic storytelling experience.
Interactive Video Archives
Visitors were presented with a carousel of interactive video cassettes representing key moments from football matches. Touching a cassette allowed the user to view significant historical football videos. As the videos played, visitors could pause, rewind, and fast-forward through key moments, offering them full control over their exploration. Additionally, text descriptions would appear when a video was selected, giving more context to the moment.
Interactive Digital Magazine/Article Viewer
The digital magazine experience allowed users to flip through pages of articles, each exploring different aspects of Qatar’s football heritage. Users could tap or swipe to turn pages, zoom into images, or click on specific articles for additional context.
Life-Size Interactive Interviews
The life-size interviews provided a unique form of interactivity, where users could engage with prominent football figures in an almost personalized manner.
Key Interactive Features Across All Experiences:
Multi-Touch Navigation
All experiences featured multi-touch capabilities, allowing for complex interactions like zooming, rotating, and selecting multiple elements at once, providing a more natural and intuitive way for users to explore the content.
Bilingual Support
The interactive interfaces were fully bilingual, allowing visitors to switch seamlessly between Arabic and English. This required ensuring that all interactive buttons and narrative text were properly localized for a diverse audience, enhancing accessibility and user engagement.
Real-Time Feedback
The interactive experiences were designed to offer real-time feedback when users interacted with elements, such as text appearing when touching a date on the timeline or videos starting when a cassette was selected. This gave users immediate visual confirmation of their actions, creating a responsive environment.
Exploration through Layers
Each interactive experience encouraged layered exploration. For example, users could dive deeper into content, moving from a high-level overview of Qatar’s football history to a more detailed exploration of specific players, teams, and games.