Balance a Coral Reef at the National Aquarium

Blacktip Reef is one of the National Aquarium’s most stunning environments, home to dozens of coral reef dwellers. With so much activity in the water, it can be a challenge for visitors to identify animals as they dart past, and to understand how this diverse ecosystem functions.

Working together with the Aquarium’s marine life experts and exhibit designers, we designed and installed digital interactives in two of their high traffic viewing areas: the Topside Viewing Gallery and the Underwater Viewing Gallery. These large touchscreens invite visitors to get to know the animals gliding, dashing, and lounging right in front of them, while also highlighting how the species fit into broader stories of conservation.

In the Topside Viewing Gallery, visitors gaze down into the aquarium’s 270,000-gallon habitat. Here, they can explore the first digital interactive, which presents an ultra-wide, richly illustrated mural of the reef environment installed on six touchscreen kiosks throughout the gallery. With intuitive pinch-and-zoom navigation, guests can find 23 of Blacktip Reef’s inhabitants, then look up from the screen and spot those same animals swimming just feet away.

In the Underwater Viewing Gallery, we installed a reef ecosystem simulation game on two large vertical touchscreens. This experience invites visitors to add different combinations of species to the digital reef to create and maintain a healthy, biodiverse environment.

Algae blooms, food scarcity, murky waters, and sparkling seas all emerge based on the visitor’s choices as they play. Behind the scenes, we bypass the platform’s typical constraints using cutting-edge optimizations, allowing us to create a dynamic scene full of life.

Both the Topside and Underwater interactives include a browsable ID mode, where visitors can filter Blacktip Reef’s species by traits such as color, size, or tail shape to quickly locate and learn about them. The digital display is integrated with the aquarium’s content management system, allowing staff to keep the touchscreen in sync with the actual animals in the tank.

Together, the new digital interactives offer distinct but cohesive experiences. The Topside Gallery now features a refreshed approach to species identification, while the Underwater Gallery introduces an entirely new layer of engagement through interactive play. Each space invites visitors to explore, experiment, and connect more deeply with the reef and its inhabitants.

Curious about how it all started? Dive into our case study about the Discovery process to see how early concepts grew into these fully realized experiences, and how we guided this project from first sketch to final splash.