Monarch Interactive

Touch screen for an impressive display home. Browse the home and even redecorate it!

Monarch Interactive was a touch screen installation in an incredible designer display home built by Monarch Building Solutions. I worked together with Emiit on the project, with them handling the client contact and physical installation, and me designing and programming the entire software package (concept, tech specs, programming, art, sound).

The touch screen is wall mounted like a TV, and welcomes visitors to the house, as well as offering a timeline gallery explaining the major stages in building a house, and a huge photo gallery of other Monarch projects.

The most interesting feature of the touch screen is the floor plan section, where you can touch on some of the rooms to see a photo of the room, as well as have the ability to change wall colours and flooring options of various carpets, tiles and wooden floorboards.

I created the graphics for each option by working from the professional photos of each room with its real flooring, and then getting photos taken of each option from the flooring supplier’s showroom (e.g. a 1 square metre carpet sample, or a 5×5 grid of tiles) and turning those into seamless graphical textures that I could recover the rooms’ floors with. I also matched the lighting, shadows and reflections for each option as well, in order to give a photo-realistic impression of each room’s options.

The touch screen also allowed visitors to see a business summary of the building material suppliers, as well as the ability to email each supplier directly from the touch screen.

Finally, the screen kept track of visitor numbers and page views for each section, and generated a daily report spreadsheet that could either taken from the screen with a USB stick, or the touch screen could automatically email the sheet to Monarch overnight.