Production of experiences, simulations and visualisations, including the coordination of live-action and 360 capture that combine screen, projected and XR (VR, AR, MR) integrations to connect audiences with beautiful cultural or historical stories, intriguing interactives, or serious simulations.
Our experiences can live inside in museums, galleries and trade shows, outside at festivals and concerts or virtually in audience owned devices.
Our experiences connect audiences and narratives through:
The Australian Museum in Sydney commissioned Monkeystack to produce a touch screen interactive for their permanent Minerals gallery – an exhibition that’s been 2.7 billion years in the making!
‘Making Minerals’ is a fun and educational interactive experience that visitors to the Museum can explore on three dedicated touch screens situated in the middle of the exhibition. We produced seven story locations, including volcano, caves and magma chambers, with animations to ‘see’ key steps of the mineral formation process and interactive elements for users to choose from and determine the mineral’s outcome.
Monkeystack was commissioned by the Australian Museum to produce a multi-user interactive table top touchscreen experience for their new permanent gallery, Wansolmoana (One Salt Ocean). The interactive reflects and reinforces the surrounding gallery themes, allowing visitors to have agency in their own experience, learn more about the sea of islands that make up the Pacific, the largest and deepest of Earth’s five oceans, and showcase a selection from the Museum’s world-leading Pasifika collection of over 60,000 objects.
Monkeystack produced a suite of engaging and educational interactive learning stations and games for the Marine Discovery Centre, the only coastal and marine educational facility for school-aged students and the broader community in South Australia.
With the support of a Green Adelaide Grassroot grant, we developed six unique experiences delivered on digital touchscreen tables, motion detecting projections and iPads that sparks imagination and encourages curiosity whilst empowering their 8,000+ student and community visitors per year to actively protect South Australia’s iconic coastal and marine environments.
‘Project Space Botany’ is an educational interactive app-based game that Monkeystack produced for the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium of South Australia as a program supported by the Department for Education.
Student groups are challenged to design a biodome that will enable life on Mars, with the key to creating the perfect biodome discovered as they follow a multi-stop physical and in-app interactive trail throughout the iconic indoor rainforest of the Bicentennial Conservatory – with a little assistance from the in-app guide Wat-L Bot.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) recently conducted a huge remodelling project for the National Electoral Education Centre (NEEC) educational space in Old Government House, Canberra. Monkeystack was commissioned to produce a 3D interactive game for the space and provide a seamless experience between the physical and digital world.
We produced the 3D game ‘DemocraCity’ using Maya and Unity, achieving a compelling and educational interactive experience for deployment on large touchscreens designed for self-directed learning. The game is built as a 3D world full of buildings, unique characters, vehicles and interiors. We developed multiple minigames that feature drag and drop, tabletop and role-playing mechanics to deliver learning through fun as a user’s newfound knowledge is put to the test.
Monkeystack partnered with POSITURE to produce gamified interactive solutions that improve the posture, mental health and well-being of children, neurodiverse people and aging populations, combatting the problems commonly caused by looking down at a phone or screen for extended periods of time.
This is the familiar posture that we all observe daily known as ‘text neck’.
Working with Positure’s team of healthcare professionals and people with lived experience, we developed gaming apps for handheld devices controlled by gross body movement, rather than standard fine motor thumb controls. Taking the solution one step further, our collaboration with industrial designers produced an optimised ergonomic handset to offer a full digital prescription of positive posture movements.
We made the problem part of the solution to promote positive learned behaviour – without taking away any of the fun!
Monkeystack were asked to produce a spatial narrative app experience with augmented reality (AR) that brought the work of contemporary First Nations artists to life for Illuminate Adelaide: South Australia’s premier winter event that brings together the best and boldest in art, music, technology and invention from around Australia and the world.
The inaugural ‘Augmented Revolution’ AR trail featured six artworks across two Adelaide CBD locations throughout the duration of the festival, with QR codes to download the app to iOS and Android devices and unique in-app scannable codes that trigger each artwork with precise positioning based upon ground detection.
Monkeystack were engaged by the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service to produce an impactful VR experience to accompany their health and wellbeing campaign, ‘Boorais and Smoke Don’t Mix’ (Boorais meaning babies or children), dedicated to their vision of a community free from the harmful effects of smoking.
The 10-minute animated, interactive journey was designed to connect to young people with voices and visual images that are familiar to them and that they respect. As soon as they begin the experience they are taken on virtual Country, ‘removing’ them from whatever physical location and surroundings they are in.
A Monkeystack and Shackleton Epic Expedition production, Thin Ice VR is a 20-minute historical re-creation documentary VR experience presented by Tim Jarvis AM.
In 1914, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton led one of history’s greatest stories of leadership and survival; the ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Over 100 years later we follow in the footsteps of Shackleton with Tim Jarvis AM, experiencing the adventure first-hand to see the effect climate change has had on the Antarctic region through immersive VR.
Major Partner: Torrens University Australia
Financed and developed with the assistance of: South Australian Film Corporation, Screen Australia and Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund
Supported by: Kathmandu, One Ocean Expeditions and Documentary Australia
The City of Adelaide asked us to produce a festive AR experience as a fun, engaging and highly accessible single point of digital contact between Adelaide’s Christmas Festival and visitors to the City of Adelaide.
We created a trail of 14 City of Adelaide Christmas Festival locations, from North Adelaide to the Christmas Village at Tarntanyangga (Victoria Square), and developed it into a gamified AR experience that visitors to the city could easily download to their smartphones and see and play in Adelaide through festive-tinted glasses.
BAE Systems Australia commissioned Monkeystack to produce an interactive experience ‘Cube’ to debut at the Land Forces International Land Defence Exposition 2021 in Brisbane, Queensland.
The team at Monkeystack produced the experiential space with our design, development and delivery representing BAE System’s structured brand guidelines as a modern, forward-thinking company with cutting-edge innovations. We built a VR-based pre-visualisation system in Unity to instruct the Cube’s physical and digital relationship, and interactivity – providing a way to build and test real world solutions without the boundaries of location.
Monkeystack produced two interactive projection-based installations for Light Creatures at Adelaide Zoo as a part of Illuminate Adelaide, inviting South Australia to experience nature in a new light.
We are proud to be Illuminate Adelaide program partners, with Light Creatures kicking off the festival’s inaugural year in style.
Curious Creatures and Feeding Frenzy were two of the six installations at home in Adelaide Zoo as part of a wider collaboration with giant glowing lanterns and winter warmer food and drink stalls, giving South Australians something to get out of the house and excited about over the winter.
Monkeystack partnered with the Adelaide Film Festival to produce and present Tales in Light, a new project that turns Adelaide’s physical spaces into a canvas for immersive visual storytelling.
The inaugural Tales in Light story ‘NUN HIT WONDER’, the story of Adelaide’s very own Sister Janet Mead’s extraordinary rise from a Mercy Sister to Grammy nominee, launched at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival Opening Night Gala and ran each evening throughout the duration of the festival.
Monkeystack produced an AR app experience for the City of Adelaide’s Green Adelaide project to showcase their work as Adelaide’s first dedicated urban environmental specialist organisation.
The ‘Turning Gray Street Green’ app uses alignment guide-based AR activations that are triggered within the app when the user scans physical decals on Gray Street, enabling experience various key elements of Green Adelaide; from an artist render of what that street will look like in future, to how water sensitive urban design is managed.
Monkeystack was commissioned by the University of South Australia Museum of Discovery (MOD.) to bring to life an interactive exhibit conceptualised and scripted by Karl ‘Winda’ Telfer, a Kaurna cultural bearer, artist and community leader.
Awarded WINNER of Permanent Exhibition or Gallery Fitout at the Australian Museums and Galleries Association’s (AMaGA) Museums Australasia Multimedia and Publication Design Awards 2022, Karru Kari is a truly stunning canvas to tell a magnificent story of the seasons from the perspective of Indigenous Australians – our first scientists and astronomers.
Monkeystack was commissioned to develop a large scale touch screen climate change interactive for the Changing Climate permanent gallery display at the Australian Museum, Sydney.
We ‘twinned’ the development, with two identical screens and servers located in both Adelaide and Sydney meaning the Museum exhibition team could play as we built.
Monkeystack were commissioned by 57 Films to produce a 360 Virtual Reality tour of Riverland Wine as part of a South Australian centric collaboration brought to life thanks to the Australian Government’s $50 million Export and Regional Wine Support Package, alongside key stakeholders including Wine Australia, Riverland Wine, University of Adelaide, Martins Brand House and 57 Films.
The signature installation of the 2020 Adelaide Fringe Festival, Yabarra – Dreaming in Light, ran at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute from 12 Feb to 15 March. For the 31 days of the Fringe, from 10am until 10pm, over 40,000 people experienced the creation story of Tjilbruke, as interpreted by Karl Winda Telfer and the Williams clan in one of the most complex indoor projected experiences created in Australia.
“Dreaming in Light tells the story of Tjirbruki, but there are so many other elements – the stories of the stars and the ancestors are so important … It’s about looking after and caring for our environment and protecting these few open space places we have left.”—Karl ‘Winda’ Telfer.
First Nations viewers are advised that this may contain images and voices of people who have passed away.
After almost seven months of forced closure due to the pandemic, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute celebrated reopening its doors and 30th birthday celebrations with the exhibition ‘Atnwengerrp – Our Apmere, Our Place’.
Monkeystack were commissioned to produce an interactive 360 experience of the Atnwengerrp (pronounced A-NOONG-a-pa) exhibition for Tandanya, allowing those who couldn’t physically attend to immerse themselves in the collection and browse the digitally captured and rehung artwork at their own pace, accompanied by a music experience created by Jimblah.
As part of the Hedonism exhibit at MOD. (Museum of Discovery at the University of South Australia), Monkeystack produced F.A.B.L.E, an AR led experiential game about consent that visitors navigate via a phone app.
The Constant app is an iOS application which uses augmented reality to deliver The Constant, 52 musical compositions from several genres, in a unified manner.
Monkeystack was commissioned to produce an interactive method of presenting the compositions to a new audience in a festival environment.
In a project produced and designed by ABC – Behind the News, Torrens Valley University and Novus Res, our animation team contributed to this world-first VR project to bring the Kokoda story to life like never before.
The VR visualisation of the Kawasaki Ninja H2R and the fictional apartment of a young engineer is an internal project that we undertook as a studio to push the graphic rendering and interactive capabilities of VR headsets.