by Maris Ensing, Mad Systems
“When Neil and I saw this door,” he said, rapping the hatch on an earlier Apollo capsule, “we didn’t like how it worked… so we had them change it.”
That throw-away line from Dick Gordon, command module pilot of Apollo 12, froze me mid-stride. I was walking through the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum beside a man who had flown to the Moon, soaking up pocket-knife fixes and insider quips no label text will ever mention.
For the next few hours, he guided me past scorched heat shields and lunar-dust stains with the scorch-proof humor of a veteran astronaut. I left buzzing, knowing I’d just experienced something 99.9 % of visitors could only dream about.
What if everyone could have that experience?
Fast-forward to the present. You step into an aviation gallery, and the air flickers. Four life-size digital figures resolve into focus:
- A pressure-suited astronaut whose visor still reflects Earthrise.
- A g-suit-clad test pilot drumming impatient fingers, eager to hit Mach 2.
- A grease-pencil aircraft designer sketching wing curves in mid-air.
- A rocket scientist clutching a coffee-stained notebook of delta-V scribbles and orbital doodles.
These avatar docents are vividly present – breathing, blinking, and shifting weight like real people. You simply choose whom you’d like to explore the museum with, tell them your age, and what you need in terms of language, interests, and depth of information. Your private, cinematic tour then snaps into gear, based on our patented technology.
Want to feel the roar of afterburners? Follow the test pilot. Crave design secrets behind a delta wing? The engineer is your mentor. Come back next month, select a different guide, and the same collection morphs into a brand-new narrative – no flag-waving docent, no twenty-person herd, just a one-to-one deep dive at whatever pace feels right.
Avatar docents are pop-up companions, not static kiosks
These avatars don’t park beside a touchscreen waiting to be poked. They phase in exactly where curiosity spikes. Linger over the SR-71 camera pod and – whoosh – the rocket scientist appears at your elbow with an animation of shock-wave interactions. Ask them to explain in more detail, and the story unfolds. Stroll past without stopping, and they politely stay out of sight, keeping the gallery uncluttered.
It’s the museum equivalent of a Netflix recommendation engine paired with a world-class human storyteller.
How it works – and why it finally feels human
Digital guides have flirted with museums for years, only to get trapped in the “uncanny valley” – that creepy, almost-but-not-quite-alive zone. What changed? Hardware horsepower, real-time rendering, and – crucially – open architecture that lets museums own the steering wheel.
The open-stack backbone
This cannot be done with black boxes. It requires an approach based on non-proprietary equipment that enables you to keep your venue updated in the long term so that the latest innovations do not pass you by for the next decade. The good thing is that your IT folks will be entirely familiar with the result:
QuickSilver runs the whole show on rugged, commodity mini-PCs – think high-spec gaming rigs, not black-box appliances. Do you need to double the GPU power for holographic shaders? Pop the lid and swap a card. Worst case, swap out the current PC for tomorrow’s model.
Alice, our patented AI-based delivery system, sits on top with CheshireCat working the recognition, doing the real magic, and hyper-personalizing every visitor’s visit:
- Facial & demographic recognition – instantly clocks who you are, which language you prefer, and whether you’re a streaker (quick scan-and-go), stroller (curious browser), or student (deep-dive sponge).
- If you’re with your family, it’ll tailor content for the kids – and if you come back later, take a side tour, or ask a question, it’ll deliver expert knowledge just for you.
- Curated “Bodies of Knowledge.” Every avatar draws from a museum-approved database of facts, stories, images, and audio. Update a single entry – “The X-15 actually hit Mach 6.7, not 6.5” – and every relevant script auto-updates across the building.
- Personal backstories. Curators can weave multi-chapter arcs: the aircraft designer might reveal a hard-won failure story only after you’ve visited three specific artifacts. It’s binge-worthy episodic content, but live.
- Dynamic content mixing. Alex loves equations; Joe digs personal drama. Alice reshapes the narrative mid-sentence, pulls different media assets, and even adjusts tone – wry for teens, formal for scholars – without missing a beat.
Lory, our patented tour guide system, delivers flawless, low-latency speech synthesis, real-time captions, sign-language avatars, and Bluetooth audio streamed straight to hearing aids – no trenching floors for loop coils.
Goodbye creepy-robot vibe
Real-time face and gesture capture drives subtleties: micro-eye saccades, fingertip drumming, a sigh before describing a tough re-entry. Visitors subconsciously register the humanity and relax. The avatar docents feel less like CGI mannequins and more like interesting people who just happen to respawn anywhere in the gallery.
Proof at home: Samtoo in Mad Systems’ lobby
Walk into Mad Systems HQ, and you meet Samtoo, our Virtual Receptionist – one of our patented technologies.
Samtoo greets staff and visitors by name, checks schedules, cracks tailored jokes, and naturally poses for selfies when asked. Marketing loves the live dashboard of trending questions. Need Korean for tomorrow’s delegation? We uploaded the language pack during lunch, with no downtime and no vendor service call.
Proprietary black boxes simply can’t move that fast. In fact, they can’t move forward at all.
See also: Personalised, accessible, and immersive: museums embrace AI for next-gen visitor experiences
Why guests, curators, and CFOs all grin
Guests
- Endless perspectives. One building, infinite storylines. Families return to hear the rocket scientist’s angle after loving the pilot’s war stories, then drag friends along for round three. They don’t mind doing it again: it’ll be different from last time!
- Hyper-personal resonance. Alex walks away quoting equations; Joe leaves quoting quips about coffee in zero-G. Both feel seen.
- No crowds, no waiting. Avatar docents offer a private tour, minus the private tour ticket price.
Curators & educators
- Full editorial control. Update the knowledge base overnight, roll out new interpretations, even spin up a limited-time avatar for Women-in-STEM month – no code rewrite required.
- Analytics that matter. Alice logs which objects spark the most questions, how long visitors linger, which stories stir emotions, and where curiosity drops off. That data feeds exhibit redesigns with surgical precision.
- Human educators get superpowers. Freed from crowd control, they host maker labs, stage live demos, and handle VIP groups —all the parts of the job that sent them to the museum school in the first place.
Leadership & finance
- Future-proof infrastructure. Commodity PCs mean decade-long cycles, not five-year forklift upgrades.
- Modular upgrades. Want volumetric capture next fiscal year? Budget a camera bar, not a control-room rebuild. Add another PC if needed.
- Revenue upside. More repeat visits, premium “Choose Your Avatar” ticket tiers, brand-sponsored personas – the monetization paths practically write themselves.
Avatar docents: the road ahead
Once the skeleton is standard PC hardware, you can bolt on muscles, skin, and soul at will – any language, presentation style, or voice.
Spatial audio, lighting, volumetric holograms, environmental scent cues, haptic floor panels that rumble when Saturn V engines ignite, or AI-generated comic books of their visits, made by Alice in the style you asked for, that visitors can take home as a souvenir.
A true VIP treatment, with plenty of options to offset the cost of creating an advanced visitor experience and generate repeat visits, too. Static labels are headed for the fossil bed. Avatar expert docents are stepping out of thin air to deliver that once-in-a-lifetime “walk with an astronaut” thrill – anytime, in any language, and for any visitor.
Museums keep the steering wheel, curators keep the story lens, and guests keep having their minds blown. That’s not just the future of interpretation; it’s the future of connection.
We’re doing most of this now, and things will only improve – and with QuickSilver, even if you don’t need this level of sophistication today, it’s ready in case you want it tomorrow. Welcome to today and to our incredible future.
