The future is now

People visit places for the art, the architecture, or simply for the experience. And when they do, they usually don’t want to stare at a small screen, wear a claustrophobic headset, or be distracted by an ever-pinging smartphone. After all, what could be more fun than talking to your family, relatives, or friends about what you’re seeing and experiencing?

450 million

Since 2009, we’ve been enthusiastically – and successfully! – promoting our Podcatcher to cultural institutions all over the world. We’ve already shared more than 450 million stories, and that number is growing every day. Never change a winning team, you might say. Keep doing what you’re doing. Nevertheless, we’ve come up with a successor.

The next level

Over the past year, with COVID-19 restrictions limiting what we could do, we’ve been focusing our attention on the ‘inside’ of Guide-ID. During my chats with our product owner Thomas and COO Johan (then still global manager), it became increasingly clear that it was time for us to take our product to the next level.

We thought: wouldn’t it be awesome if we created a device that enables our customers to serve all their visitors? A device that could also be fully integrated into the exhibition? And was just as simple as our current Podcatcher? There’s no doubt it’d be awesome, but it’s not something that happens overnight. That’s why I’d like to keep you updated on the development of our new audio guide over the next weeks and months.

Multifunctional

For years now, exhibition designers and interactive designers have been asking us whether the Podcatcher could also be used as a remote control for games or to ‘control’ a room. They also wondered whether visitors could listen to a story together, or whether you could listen hands-free without being cut off from the outside world.

From ‘no’ to ‘yes, absolutely’

Sadly, we used to have to say no all the time. We felt we were letting our customers and ourselves down. However, we’ll soon be able to say: ‘Yes! Absolutely!’ That’s thanks to the new Podcatchers’ wide range of sensors: it can be used as your personal remote control during your museum visit. And that’s not all...

Interactivity as it should be

Museums will soon be able to track all new Podcatchers throughout a building, so that the storytelling starts automatically as soon as a visitor enters a room. Even cooler still is that the room itself knows that a visitor has entered, and can respond to that. This is interactivity as it should be.

The Podcatcher as an identification tool

Every visitor who has a Podcatcher is assigned a unique number they can use to log on to an interactive console and obtain more information or play a game. Using the Podcatcher as an identification tool means no more fussing about with separate passes, rings, or other gadgets. Instead, you’ve got one single device that tells your visitors all the stories and is also fully integrated into the exhibition. How cool is that?

Want to know more?

If you think this is cool and want to know more about it, please message Thomas, Johan, or myself. We’ll explain everything with our usual dose of enthusiasm! There’s still lots of news about school groups, tourist buses, and families, as well as more updates on our software developments. But I’ll save all that for next time.

The sky is not the limit, it's the beginning.