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A sculpted touch pool with shallow real water, marsh grasses around the rim, and terrapins, crabs and fish projected onto the basin floor
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Case study

A marsh you can put your hands in

Three interactive touch pools at Explorers Cove, where real water and sculpted rockwork carry a projected Georgia marsh.

Client
Georgia Aquarium
Sector
Museums & attractions
Capability
Interactive projection & real-time content
Year
2024
The problem

Everything a touch pool does, without the husbandry

A traditional touch pool works because there is something alive in it. That brings husbandry, welfare limits, seasonal availability and a hard ceiling on how many small hands can go in the water in a day.

Explorers Cove needed pools that behaved like touch pools, with hands in the water and animals that react, but without live animals in them. The brief was a Georgia marsh, stocked species by species: fiddler crabs, mudskippers, horseshoe crabs, diamondback terrapins and redfish, each moving as itself.

The exhibit had to run in real water, two to three inches of it, in basins visitors reach into, which rules out treating the surface as a screen. The projection has to sit on moving water and sculpted rock, and the animals have to answer a hand entering the water rather than run a timed loop. As far as we know, it had not been done this way before, so there was no reference build to work from.

What we simulated

Real water, projected life

The exhibit pairs physically built basins of sculpted rockwork, planted margins and two to three inches of standing water, with content authored in Unreal Engine for those exact surfaces, so the projection lands on real geometry rather than a flat screen.

Real water, not a screen

Each scene is authored to its pool's actual shape, so animals move across contours and shallows and read correctly through a few inches of standing water.

Animals that answer a hand

Reach in and the fiddler crabs scatter, the redfish break away. The response is to the hand, in real time, not a loop waiting to come round again.

A Georgia marsh, species by species

Fiddler crabs, mudskippers, horseshoe crabs, diamondback terrapins and redfish, at true scale, in water children can put their hands in.

New species without a rebuild

Adding a species or changing the scenery is a content update, not construction. The basins stay; what lives in them can change.

Watch it
A horseshoe crab projected onto the floor of the touch pool, seen through a few inches of moving water

Marsh life on real water

The pool from the visitor's side, in water a few inches deep

Handheld at the pool's edge. The projection sits on real water and sculpted rock, and the ripples run across it.

What changed

What it did for the gallery

The gallery gained three interactive touch pools and a learning area, and an audience for species a live pool could never hold.

3
interactive touch pools
The exhibit

Two states, one marsh

The same basin reads completely differently depending on where it is in the cycle, which is the point. A visitor who comes back after lunch is not looking at the same marsh.

A child leaning over the rim of the touch pool with a hand in the shallow water, a horseshoe crab projected onto the basin floor beside it
Hands in real water. The horseshoe crab is projected; the water, the rockwork and the marsh grasses are not.

Overhead view of a touch pool with a horseshoe crab, fiddler crabs, a terrapin and a fish projected across the basin floor among marsh grasses
The marsh from above: horseshoe crab, fiddler crabs, a terrapin and a fish sharing one basin.

Another of the pools built as a shallow mudflat, with fiddler crabs projected across the sculpted bank beside a weathered timber structure
Another of the pools, built as a mudflat, using the same approach on a different piece of geometry.

The same exhibit at dusk: a treeline and sunset projected across the back wall, the pool dark and still
Dusk. The backdrop carries the sky through sunset while the pool settles. The same exhibit, hours later.

Capabilities used

How this was built

01

Content

Interactive and immersive work built for the surface it lives on.
02

Simulations

Photo-real, real-time models used to settle decisions before anything is built.
03

The studio

An Atlanta crew building photo-real, real-time work in Unreal Engine.
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