Let's Talk!

What if visitors can express themselves by sharing their thoughts about the topic on a public display?

Our first major project was for the Senzatomica exhibition, held in Rome from March 20 to May 18 at the Women’s Hospital.

Senzatomica is a campaign aimed at raising awareness about the dangers of nuclear weapons, using interactive and emotional experiences to connect with visitors.

The exhibition’s focus in Rome was to create an immersive journey through the personal stories of hibakusha (survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings), narrated by Carmen Consoli. Our task was to enhance the final segment of the exhibition with an interactive installation, enabling visitors to leave a lasting impression through their words.

Project goal

The goal of the interactive exhibition was to engage visitors at the conclusion of their tour, encouraging them to interact with an intimate space. This interaction allowed them to record a message, which would be recorded, transcribed and displayed at the exhibition’s entrance. The ultimate goal was to inspire visitors to share their thoughts and simultaneously attract passersby to explore the exhibition.

What we build

We designed and developed a custom software system to achieve this goal. The solution consisted of:

• Speech recognition application: A custom web application, built using the Vue framework, which detected and transcribed visitor speeches into text.
• Real-time message display: A separate web application, also built with Vue, that dynamically displayed collected messages in an engaging way at the exhibition entrance.
• Backend system using Retool: A backend system, built on Retool, that managed the entire software integration, message collection and retrieval, as well as the admin management.

The Retool-based backend included:

• Message management & moderation interface: A user-friendly interface that allowed the client to moderate the transcribed messages in real time as well as highlighting some of them for visualization purpose.
• APIs for communication: Custom workflows set as API endpoints to facilitate communication between the speech recognition app, message display app, and backend.

Additionally, we leveraged Retool’s features to provide the project with the following:

• Retool app: An private interface to easily manage and moderate visitor messages used by the client.
• Retool database: Used to store all the transcribed messages.
• API Workflows: APIs that handled message collection, moderation, and display.

The project was fairly complex, involving multiple software systems working together. In addition to the custom software required for the unique solution, Retool played a key role, enabling us to rapidly establish a backend, API layer, and back-office application, all while ensuring solid security and reliability.

The system collected a thousand messages, most of which were published for public display. The interface for message management was so simple that we didn't have to explain it to the moderation staff.

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