Since its founding in July 2006, the goal of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has been to apply an international approach to organizing cultural events, providing a platform for experimentation, debate and discussion, and creating new synergies with other cultural players, to be a catalyst for cultural change – in short, to ‘think globally and act locally’. This slogan stresses the importance of seeing Palazzo Strozzi as a unique cultural destination, ‘not just as an exhibition’. Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi aims at making exhibitions fun and interesting, so visitors enjoy coming to see the art presented. The investment in technology was made to awaken visitors’ curiosity and whet their appetite for culture.
Keeping this in mind, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi chose to enrich one of their latest exhibitions, “Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities”, with an interactive game that helps visitors understand the process used for making money during the Renaissance period.
“When we first started to think about this exhibition on Money and Beauty we were confronted with the problem about money itself and how banks made money back then. We realized that it would be very complicated to explain” states James Bradburne, Director of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
“Therefore, instead of just telling the story using pictures, objects and labels” continues Mr. Bradburne, “we decided to create a different way for visitors to understand how banks made money in the Renaissance. This involved bar code scanners and an interactive computer game that takes the visitors through all the stages of the money making process.”
The system would read the bar code on the visitor’s ticket with Datalogic’s innovative Magellan™ 1100i omnidirectional presentation scanner. The scanners are distributed across the exhibition, so the visitors can play an interactive game that explores the banking system, called ‘Follow your Florins.’ A virtual capital of 1,000 Florins can be invested and tracked during the visit to the different interactive stations. If the visitors are able to earn money, then they will get a discount at the book shop.
The unique aspect of this game is that the visitors use their own ticket to the exhibition and the bar code on the back to enter it. With the Datalogic Magellan 1100i scanners, the visitors can scan the bar code on their ticket automatically, providing the necessary information to start the game. The system recognizes and retains this information throughout the exhibition so the choices made regarding virtual money can be maintained.
Thanks to Datalogic’s latest digital imaging technology, the Magellan 1100i scanner provides intuitive and fast reading performance on 1D and 2D bar codes. It also supports more advanced features like image capture and EAS tag deactivation. All this comes in a compact case with a small footprint.
“Thanks to Datalogic’s scanners distributed across the exhibition,” mentioned Federica Guiotto, Datalogic ADC Marketing Manager, “the visitors can identify themselves and play this game, while enjoying and appreciating the art placed before them. The introduction of this technology was a great success: about 10,000 international visitors played the game in just the first month and a half of the exhibition.”
Customer: Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
Industry: Hospitality/Entertainment
Application: Mobile Marketing
Country: Italy
Datalogic Products: Magellan 1100i
