Initiative Industriemuseum Bayreuth Launches Gamified Exhibition About Richard Wagner

The first interactive exhibition about Richard Wagner, organised by the Initiative Industriemuseum Bayreuth, takes a playful approach. Emergo Entertainment developed the app for this exhibition.

The Bayreuth Industrial Museum initiative (Initiative Industriemuseum Bayreuth) has been inviting visitors to its first interactive exhibition on Richard Wagner and industry since 20 July. The exhibition, entitled 'Help Richard build his festival theatre' (Hilf Richard, sein Festspielhaus zu bauen), takes a game-based approach. The aim is to solve small tasks on a smartphone so that Richard Wagner can build his festival theatre. With each task, visitors have to collect enough capital to finance the construction of the festival theatre, which is also supposed to be based on real events. The content of the exhibition is presented via a free app.

Visitors scan QR codes attached to wooden pillars displaying 3D prints of various buildings representing sites relevant to the construction of the festival hall. In doing so, they receive small quests, the fulfilment of which allows them to collect capital in the form of physical coins for the construction of the hall. The exhibition is considered 'completed' when enough coins have been collected and dropped into a coin slot under the Festival Hall. The app was developed in collaboration with Emergo Entertainment, also based in Bayreuth.

"Our vision is to rethink the museum," says Florian André Unterburger, chairman of the initiative, explaining the motivation behind the project. "Now that the traditional Wagner Festival is no longer able to sell all its tickets, Bayreuth should once again provide the impetus for a new media innovation. To this end, we are working with the games studio Emergo Entertainment and the traditional piano manufacturer Steingraeber. Thanks to funding of 60,000 Euros from the Bayerische Sparkassenstiftung, the Oberfrankenstiftung and the Rainer Markgraf Stiftung, we can now gradually turn our vision into reality."

The exhibition was opened to invited guests on the evening of Friday 19 July by the Mayor of Bayreuth, Thomas Ebersberger.

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