- interactive activations and activities
- beautiful, ambient media
- professional, immersive sound design
- dynamic show lighting
- user-friendly show controls
Carnival’s objective was simple: bring more guests into the space for fun experiences. This objective was not only met with a great deal of success, in many cases it exceeded all expectation. This was especially true when it came to the interactive experiences.
Each interactive utilizes a bespoke tablet or kiosk as a portal to controlling what’s happening behind the scenes, custom designed to make the experience easily accessible to any guest.
The “Virtual Aquarium” reflects the youthful joy for creativity and play, blending a cinematic seascape with the whimsical experience of designing your own sea creature, whether hand-colored or digitally created, and watching it magically come to life on the screens. This interactive also has a surprise engagement feature on the lower level of this two-story experience with a playful spotlight appearing along the promenade every few minutes.
The observant guests who notice, and subsequently step into the light, activate a fun and playful localized takeover in the aquarium environment, complete with media, lighting, sound, and music. Guests might get surprised by the appearance of rubber ducks on their way to the Seacation resort or captivated by the musical stylings of their favorite sea life performers, or even greeted by a friendly scuba diver in this fantasy underwater world. Behind the scenes an array of thermal cameras and bespoke software tracks guests within the space. When tied to the interactive show control system, guest movements and actions translate to in-the-moment media, lighting, and sound responses.
“SoundWaves” is the nighttime show that takes the idea of a jukebox to a whole new level. With this interactive dance party, guests can not only choose the tune they want to hear, but they can also create the type of show they want to see by pairing the song with custom digital music visualizers and reactive in-the-moment lighting design. Guest selections are queued up to create a one-of-a-kind show.
”Change The Currents” allows guests to transform The Currents space by putting that power literally at their fingertips. Guests can choose between six beautiful animated underwater scenes, complete with immersive bespoke lighting and sound design. Guest curiosity drives this interactive with a sense of exploration and discovery of different underwater environments.
”Jubilee Atlas” is a touch screen interactive map designed to provide an additional, more thoughtful engagement within the Currents Zone, allowing guests to explore ships and destinations worldwide. Featuring the Live Fleet, it displays real-time ship locations and upcoming destinations. Guests can share their travel experiences through a virtual pin board, learn aquatic fun facts, and enjoy delightful, informative animations that express the excitement of travel.
Two of the biggest challenges creating any interactive experience on a cruise ship is scheduling and staffing: while at sea there’s always a very well-defined daily schedule for every experience around the ship, and not every experience can be staffed. That’s where Diva-Beaudry Interactive’s innovative behind-the-scenes show control system -stepped in. Diva sits at the middle of these interactive experience, closely tied to the overall show control and scheduling system, while allowing dynamic control from guests at just the right moment.
The Current Zone saw number of guests climb to 50-75 several times a day, sometimes even drawing the space over capacity and having guests being rerouted elsewhere.
In terms of meeting the original objectives – we can safely say that in the eyes of Carnival team, and in the eyes of the guests, The Currents has far exceeded all expectations.
Partners
In order to achieve this vision with a level of excellence, Carnival hired a team of experts to handle each area of The Currents’ activations: Beaudry Interactive to design and build the interactive experiences, Batwin and Robin, and Infinite World Studios to produce the media, Brian Monahan to produce the show lighting, Clay Avery to create the D3 show programming, David Gregory to produce high-level, immersive sound design, and Richard Cladd to develop the remote show controls for the staff.