An interactive journey through company history: creating the JUST customer experience with tonwelt media guide

Situated in the beautiful alpine countryside around Appenzell in Switzerland, the newly created JUST World tour offers visitors an interactive journey through the JUST company’s exciting history. A key element in this multimedia experience is provided by the mediaguide devices from tonwelt. As comprehensive digital all-rounders, mediaguides not only supply JUST World visitors with videos, audio narrations, slideshows and synchronised voiceovers for the tour’s 360° cinema, they also allow visitors to collect points and answer questions.

The tour begins with a special Swiss-style welcome from Sonia – a virtual tour guide who accompanies visitors throughout the whole JUST World experience. From its humble beginnings as a small Appenzell brush factory in the 1930s, JUST has grown into a major global company with a 120,000 strong workforce specialising in herbal and plant-based cosmetics, body care ranges and household products. Accompanied by Sonia, visitors on the tour gain insights not only into the story of the company’s founder, Ulrich Jüstrich, but also into JUST’s global activities and the manufacturing processes that go into creating its many products. The JUST World experience has been designed to playfully expand the visitor’s knowledge of nature, cosmetics and both traditional and ultra-modern production methods. Using an innovative play-based approach, it allows visitors to collect points throughout the tour and to win a small or larger gift from the company at the end of their visit. The exhibition designer Ralph Eichenberger from Eichenberger Szenografie in Lucerne has been extensively involved in the JUST World project for the last five years. Acting as its supervisor, he came up with a concept for integrating our interactive mediaguides into the tour which included a clear idea about the role they should play in the visitor experience.

Play to Win – triggering and collecting points

The JUST World experience has been designed to promote learning through play. By integrating tonwelt triggerPoints into the tour, visitors are given an opportunity to answer questions and collect “edelweiss points” along the way. Sonia the virtual tour guide poses these questions, and every time a correct answer is logged into the visitor’s device, a refreshing shower of animated edelweiss blossoms floods their screen and fills up their points account at the bottom of the display. Edelweiss points can be won every time a trigger or tag is activated. After that, each station’s specific multimedia content is played, ranging from audio commentaries on particular products to videos from the company archives or slideshows retelling the JUST story through historical and contemporary images. In addition to the near-field trigger points, several room triggers have also been installed throughout the exhibition. These are used to automatically welcome visitors during the production segments of the tour and to change screen content without visitor interaction. When visitors pass the trigger point at the end of the tour, for example, they automatically receive their final edelweiss score and a closing animation to say goodbye.

The Scene Editor: combining timed shows with individual interactive behaviour on visitor devices

The multimedia highlight of the exhibition is without doubt the 360° JUST World cinema, which is the first of its kind in the Appenzell region. With the help of surround sound, an elaborately produced film and a special scent machine, visitors are quite literally immersed – with all their senses – into an experience covering Alpine nature, traditional herbal knowledge and its evolution into modern research and development. The virtual tour guide Sonia is also part of this show, and as she accompanies visitors through the story of herbal medicine in the Appenzell region, she also asks questions from the screen. Multiple choice answers to these questions appear on each visitor’s mediaguide device in perfect synchronisation with the video track. If a visitor’s answer is correct, 100 points are awarded. If the answer is wrong, the visitor receives no points but gets a hint about which answer was correct. The entire JUST World experience is currently available in 6 languages, with all the translations and voice-overs having been produced in the tonwelt studios in Berlin. The JUST World experience is yet another illustration of how exciting and varied storytelling can be when tonwelt supraGuides are fully integrated into an exhibition’s media technology.