Designing Experiences for Things We Can’t See
Technology can capture attention. Creating understanding is harder.
In museums, success is not measured by clicks, conversions, or engagement metrics alone. It is measured by whether people leave seeing the world differently than when they arrived.
Many of the most important stories shaping our future exist beyond the limits of human perception.
DNA. Climate systems. Deep oceans. Ecosystems. Cosmic structures.
How do you help someone observe climate change unfolding across vast stretches of time, explore the inside of a cell, understand genetic connections shared across all life, or fly through the Solar System and beyond into our galaxy?
For years, immersive technologies and connected interfaces have focused primarily on individual experiences: headsets, personal devices, and private screens. Yet some of the most powerful experiences happen together. Museums are places where moments of discovery are shared, where encountering something previously unknown about the natural world, human history, our planet, or our place in the universe becomes a collective experience.
Drawing from over a decade of creating digital experiences that help millions of museum visitors engage with complex scientific ideas, connect with nature, and experience things that would otherwise remain invisible, Eozin Che explores how creative technologists can transform a 150-year-old museum into a living interface for curiosity, participation, and discovery.
Through examples that include bringing museum dioramas, artifacts, specimens, and entire halls into digital spaces; creating immersive learning environments and storytelling frameworks; augmenting exhibits with context-aware layers of digital content; and exploring vision-based AI as a way to extend and enrich physical displays, this talk examines how interactive technologies can reveal hidden worlds, deepen understanding, and create shared experiences that move people from wonder to understanding.
Exploring
- How creative technologists can help people feel connected to science, nature, human history, and the future
- Designing experiences around phenomena that cannot be directly seen, touched, or experienced
- Making invisible systems, from DNA and past environments to the edge of the observable universe, feel closer, more tangible, and more meaningful
- Lessons from immersive media environments that prioritize understanding over spectacle
- Digitizing museums and collections to create new forms of access, storytelling, and exploration
- Augmenting physical places with context-aware experiences that respond to visitor curiosity
- The role of vision-based AI in museum learning and interpretation
- What museums can teach us about immersive storytelling and new forms of experiential design
- How to create moments that visitors remember and talk about long after they leave