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Ideum Expands: Adds New Exhibit Workshop

A New Building in Corrales Allows Ideum to Create More Specialized Digital Exhibits
Apr
18
2018
Authored by
Jim Spadaccini
Founder & Creative Director

While our company might be best known for our multitouch tables & touch displays, we’ve been developing other types of interactive digital exhibits for several years. Our Usability and Prototyping lab and Industrial Design Atelier have become hives of experimentation, chock-full of devices and mockups for projection mapping projects, interactive video walls, and other specialized digital exhibits and prototypes. That’s why we are pleased to announce that we are expanding our campus: we are now renovating a new building dedicated to developing and testing the next generation of digital exhibits.

The building, formerly a woodworking shop in Corrales only a few miles from our current offices and labs, will have a new high-tech workshop with a plasma cutter, CNC, laser cutter, and a host of other specialized tools to allow us to work in wood, plastics, and even metal prototyping. In this flexible new Exhibit Workshop, we will be building physical exhibits with integrated electronics, such as displays, sensors, LED lights, and a variety of IOT devices.

Our new workshop will also make it easier for us to integrate our innovative Inline Displays into cabinetry and exhibits. In addition, we’ll be expanding our work on more specialized electronic exhibits, such as the pressure activated LED panels we developed with Stashed or the digital telescopes we developed with the Exploratorium. While most of our metal fabrication will continue to be done off-site with one of our vendors, the ability to prototype onsite will shorten some of our development cycles and allow us to develop and test new touch table and touch display products more quickly and efficiently.

While nearly half of this new space will be dedicated for high-tech shop tools, the remaining half will be used to prototype and stage large exhibitions, including projection mapping installations and immersive video walls. This AV exhibit space will have flexible rigging and power to allow for easy setup and adjustments. Two large roll-up doors will allow us to move exhibits in and out of the space easily.

The inside of the building is currently being completely renovated. A new heating and refrigeration system, LED lighting, ADA compliant bathroom, networking, and other improvements are in progress. We expect the new exhibit workshop to operational by June 2018—just in time to play a key role in several new projects already underway. We will post more photos showing the space as it comes together.