The Buffalo History Museum Design Challenge

GIF
AI Colorization in effect on bringing the canal video to life.
AI Colorization on enhancing visualization of environments.
AI Colorization on the Electric Tower.
AI Colorization on the New York State Building.
AI Colorization on McKinley's arrival at the Temple of Music.
AI Colorization on the West Mall Bridge.
Visual Mock-up

Team Pan-Am Pioneers, Team 3

Challenge Statement

In 1901, 8 million visitors from around the world converged on Buffalo to explore the Pan-American Exposition, a world’s fair that took place across 350 acres in our city. Shortly after the Exposition closed, most of this extraordinary fair was demolished and a neighborhood rose in its place, causing this extraordinary moment in Buffalo to fade into history. Our Museum is the only remaining planned, permanent structure from the fair.

How can we bring the Exposition and its grounds back to life through a new digital, immersive experience that utilizes the Museum’s collection, including hundreds of historic photos of the event?

Here's the Whole Story

Our idea is to bring a seasonal VR exhibit to truly live the fair years and years ago. We know that the museum's concern is not in implementing, but in maintaining it and creating a future. So, we propose a partnership with local universities and businesses to create and maintain the technology, which sets the stage to apply for grant money from programs, that love just that.

Through consistent communication with museum representatives during this challenge, we learned what they were looking for and wanted to tailor our idea to their needs. They mentioned a desire to expand the demographic towards younger audiences, and VR would achieve that. We not only want to offer a fun experience, but we want to educate the youth because to truly maintain history, we must pass it on.

How it Works

A user would book an appointment on the Buffalo Museum website, which is already an existing infrastructure. Then they would come to the museum at their appointment time and experience the VR with a VR headset. This booking would not only eliminate wait time and need for excess staffing but also create some sort of "exclusive experience."

Technological Feasibility and Features

Through partnerships with college students, the project is very technologically feasible. We added some ideas to take advantage of generative AI and the museum's existing collection to offer this immersive experience. This includes colorizing old images to bring user's a vivid experience of the fair. In addition, we trained AI on the museum's existing walking tour script and the boat tour's description to create a narration script for the video. We used an AI voice generation to narrate this script and overlayed it on the video to offer the user the full experience. These are just some of the many ideas we can incorporate into VR at a low cost and timely manner.

Budgeting

There's an estimated cost of $20,000 for the equipment and labor funding this project. We aim to fund the project by creating new partnerships and applying to grants. Also, we project a $150,000 increase in revenue by setting the price at $15 per person. We also estimate a 43% increase in foot traffic by the increase in demographic reach.