Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center: interactive and immersive museum installation around the former Russian president

The opening of this center dedicated to the figure of the first president of the Russian Federation and the historical events of the 1990s 90 It has the latest technological exhibition techniques, like a big curved Led screen, an immersive audiovisual room, interactive and touch panels and state-of-the-art audio systems.

Inaugurated on 25 November 2015, he Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center and Museum dedicated to the figure of the first president of the Russian Federation, who ran the State when the USSR disintegrated into 1991, and to the profound changes of the years 90, It is a modern cultural and social facility.

Located in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg (Yekaterinburg), the most populated in the Ural Federal District and Sverdlovsk Oblast, This center houses a museum dedicated to former president Boris Yeltsin, an exhibition area, an educational center and a library, a children's space, a conference room and event area.

The project has taken around three years to become a reality., mainly in terms of the development of all aspects of design production and multimedia content of the center and the museum dedicated to the figure of the former president, made by the producers Persona Films and sister company Twitch Post.

The inauguration was attended by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin; your prime minister, Mevdevev Dimitry, as well as Boris Yeltsin's widow, Naina Yeltsina, and broad political representation, business and cultural of the country.

As contractor and designer of this project, Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA) entrusted the museographic execution and technical development of the project to the Spanish specialist Acciona Productions and Design.

Exclusive historical content

The museum's exhibition area includes seven themed rooms, in which it is detailed with visual systems, documentaries, images and other elements the history of the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin; the coup d'état and the beginning of the reforms 1991 that changed the history of the country; the events of October 1993; the war in Chechnya; the presidential elections of 1996; the development of the market economy and relationship with the West, until the year 2000.

To collect this enormous historical documentation, some provided by the Kremlin and Yeltsin's family archive, the Persona Films team traveled the world to film 133 exclusive interviews with political and cultural leaders; capture footage from over a hundred archival sources and produce 163 interactive programs.

Atrium with curved LED panel

To define and design the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, a number of zones were assigned, each of which is distinguished by specific technical requirements, functional level, technological and aesthetic, which has counted on the work of the Russian integrator AudioVideoSistemy (Audiosite).

One of the technological innovations of this center developed by Acciona Producciones y Diseño is the so-called Atrium, an open space that has a curved LED screen (of 61.2×9,7 meters and a radius of curvature of 39 m.), which shows some of the most significant moments of Boris Yeltsin's political and personal career.

For this purpose, six video projection points have been established., distributed in groups made up of five model installation projectors Panasonic PT-DS20K, with a luminosity of 20.000 lumens each and equipped with ET-D75LE6 lenses from this manufacturer, located on the second floor.

This unique installation, currently the largest permanent diorama in the world projecting on a curved system, is complemented with 3D mapping effects and the videos are accompanied by a high-quality sound system. L-acoustics, composed of PowerMatch PM8500N boost amplifiers from the firm Bose, to create background music and play announcement messages on plants 1 y 3.

Background sound is intended to play the audio track of the video in sync with the screen, as well as in the rest of the downtown areas, with independent volume control on each floor. The system provides a sound pressure level of not less than 90 dB (with frequency range of 80 Hz – 17 kHz). The public address system has been integrated into the speakers (located in groups of six on the racks surrounding the screen), from the Bose model.

Each group consists of a linear array of four L-Acoustics ARCS IIs and an equal number of subwoofers. Twelve speakers of this model have been uniformly arranged at the bottom of the screen., whose control is carried out with the LA8 and LA4x systems from this same supplier.

A mobile stage has been created to hold cultural events that also take place in this space., equipped with sound systems as described, as well as with stages and LED light sources Martin Professional Lighting which are managed from the M2Go system and from the CL3 digital mixing console of Yamaha.

Permanent exhibition

Acciona Producciones y Diseño has been responsible for the technical development and museographic execution of the permanent exhibition, which occupies a total of 2.300 square meters, distributed over two floors.

The objects and resources on the ground floor help contextualize the exhibition in a historical journey, cultural and political in 20th century Russia, while the upper floor is divided into seven rooms, each of which is dedicated to a stage in the creation of contemporary Russia, to which you travel through scenic recreations that reconstruct spaces and key moments of the period between 1987 y 1999.

Among these recreations of historical places and moments, those of the Politburo stand out - where a full-scale image of Boris Yeltsin emulates the moment in which he gave his 'Secret Speech' at the Plenary Session of the Central Committee in October 1987; that of a Moscow trolleybus 1985 in which images of the president's childhood appear.

Added to this is also the recreation of the living room of an apartment where the broken daily life on the day of the attempted coup d'état of 1991 against President Mikhail Gorbachev; a store with products of the time or a radio station, where visitors can listen to radio speeches Yeltsin gave during his second term, between October 1996 and August 1998.

Finally, The 'Freedom Gallery' offers testimonies from personalities and people from the street about the figure of Boris Yeltsin and the historical era in which he was a protagonist and gives all visitors the opportunity to leave a message about freedom in the interactive system 'What freedom means to me'.

The plants 2 y 3 host the temporary exhibition gallery, in which around a dozen professional screens in different formats have been installed to show related videos and interactive applications, carried out by the specialist Cyan for Acciona Productions and Design.

Guaranteed security

The center has an IP video surveillance system based on Panasonic model WV-SC588 PTZ dome cameras distributed throughout the facility., to capture high resolution images of 2,4 megapixels to 30 fps, as well as streaming of multiple JPEG/H.264 video streams.

These cameras have a 360º panoramic and tilt function between –25 and 205°, since these systems rotate 45º horizontally eight times, so that the operator can display the same number of thumbnail images in another window and perform up to 256 preset positions.

Management is carried out with software that centralizes all PTZ network cameras for viewing images in real time, which are also stored on the device's memory card and on a server.

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