Pocket Exhibitions

Pocket Exhibitions is a pilot project I developed with the SNSB (Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen München). The idea is simple: create small, mobile exhibitions that can travel and pop up in different places, each one focused on a single research topic and the people behind it.

For the first round, we launched two exhibitions. One is all about “ROMY” - short for “Rotational Motions in Seismology” - and features a unique ring laser at the Geophysical Observatory Fürstenfeldbruck (TU Munich). This instrument measures the Earth’s rotation and seismic movements, even those that regular seismographs can’t detect.
The other exhibition is dedicated to the newly discovered Bavarian predatory dinosaur, Wiehenvenator albati. The fossils offer a fascinating glimpse into the world of Jurassic megatheropods.

My role was to build a kiosk web app where visitors can watch and listen to interviews with the researchers. For ROMY, I added a gyroscope and magnetometer so visitors can interact and get a feel for the concept of rotation. The system is designed to be flexible - future exhibitions just need to swap out the videos and titles, and only the special interactive parts need extra development.

The physical kiosks were designed by Tulp design and built by Magicon, who welcomed me into their workshop for installation and testing. Right now, the exhibitions are set up at the Geologische Hochschule München, freely accessible in public spaces. It’s been great to see people stop by, explore, and get curious about the research on display.

On the technical side, Pocket Exhibitions runs as a straightforward web app on a 32" touchscreen PC in portrait mode. Visitors can choose from four different interviews with two researchers, each sharing insights about their work, how they got started, and how others can get involved. The interviews are chaptered by question, so the experience feels familiar - think Instagram Stories, but for science. Visitors can skip between questions or rewatch them, making the interaction intuitive and modern.

To keep things scalable, I built the app so that for future exhibitions, organizers can simply swap out the videos and provide a new list of chapter timestamps. The skipping and navigation features automatically adapt to the new content, making it easy to reuse the kiosk for any research topic. We’re also logging all user interactions to see how people use the kiosk. So far, it looks like most visitors enjoy rewatching questions, but don’t skip around as much as you might expect.

Hardware was its own adventure. Since the kiosks are set up in public spaces, everything has to meet strict German fire safety standards, which means a fireproof case. The touchscreen PC provided for the project was a bit of a relic - an Intel Atom E3845, about 12 years old, sealed inside an integrated system and surrounded by an unbreachable steel casing.

For most of the kiosk’s features, this setup was fine. However, for the ROMY exhibit’s gyroscope and magnetometer, it required some extra consideration. Normally, I’d process raw sensor data on the PC, but with this hardware, I had to offload the heavy lifting to the ESP32, rather than just using it as an intermediary. The ESP32 averages and processes the sensor data before sending it to the kiosk, which makes it much easier on the CPU to display the results in real time - using individual graphs for each axis and a 3D digital twin built with Three.js.

We originally planned to use a high-end professional sensor - the LPMS-NAV3 from LP-Research - which I was excited to test and integrate. The sensor was designed to be cast into a clear resin sphere for public use, keeping it safe while remaining visible to visitors. Unfortunately, when it arrived at my doorstep, it was dead on arrival.

Since I was intrigued by the sensor and wanted to be certain it was truly broken, I reached out to the ROMY researchers for help. They were kind enough to invite me to their observatory in Fürstenfeldbruck, where we could troubleshoot together. We couldn't get the sensor working, but I did get an excellent tour of their facility - which was a nice consolation prize.

This happened very close to the exhibition launch, so we needed a quick alternative. For supply and timing reasons, I switched to an MPU-9250/9265 IMU. It's a capable little sensor, but there's a catch: since the chip shortage, manufacturers seem to have stopped including the magnetometer in many units without updating the specifications. When you order a batch of ten, some might actually have a working magnetometer, but most won't - the address just returns empty. It's one of those quirks you learn to work around in hardware development.

More info on where to catch the exhibitions can be found on this SNSB website.
Photos: Kathrin Glaw