The professional challenges of the Richter Gedeon Visitor Centre exhibition
Richter Gedeon is a leading Hungarian pharmaceutical company, founded in Budapest in 1901. The company is active in the research, development and manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Richter Gedeon focuses on research and innovation and has created a number of proprietary medicines that have contributed to improving patient care worldwide. The company is also committed to supporting healthcare professionals and patient education, and plays an important role in sustainability and social responsibility.
In line with the company's values, it is not surprising that they wanted to create an exhibition where Richter Gedeon's work would be presented using the latest technology in the company's visitor centre, to be interesting and accessible to a wide range of ages and audiences.
The assignment came after we were approached by an agency. The project was preceded by almost a year of negotiations and was eventually completed in 3 months. Throughout the work we were in constant contact with various departments of the company, pharmacists, doctors who proofread the exhibition elements and we were given a design manual to work with. There was a minor hitch when we were first thought to be a medical technology company, but later on our many technical clarifying questions were answered very readily.
Ease of use was an important aspect in the design of the exhibition, so we tried to make everything accessible and understandable with a single touch, and not to bore visitors with multiple menu levels. With foreign visitors in mind, we tried to use spoken icons instead of text where possible, and Richter provided the English translation of the rest of the system.
Contrasting colours were used to make the exhibition more enjoyable for people with different colour perception problems. We designed the entire system and provided the necessary connections, both technical and physical.
We started with the touch screen elements because they are the easiest to test and use for presentation purposes. Then came the tablet, followed by AR and VR elements. The use of fixed tablets offered a significant optimisation advantage, as it was sufficient to install the necessary configuration on a single device.
The biggest unexpected twist in the development was the change of venue. As the lighting conditions changed, AR elements designed for specific physical conditions became unenjoyable and had to be redesigned.
A difficulty in testing was that everything was part of a physical build-out, so it was difficult to model the dimensions in our own office. Our development team therefore spent days testing in the showroom, and we were there for up to a week fixing bugs. A further problem was that one of the devices we used for the VR experience had disappeared from the market, and a new one was much more expensive to buy. This is of course more common than average with a company developing innovative services.
The biggest professional challenge at the show was a two-metre LED sphere, where we stretched an LED screen over a sphere - calculating how to display it required a lot of creativity and innovation on our part.
In the end, the product management client and the animation team were extremely satisfied with our work, and the exhibition is still on display in the old Richter Tower building in Kőbánya during the Richter Gedeon.