Write Your Name Like a Pharaoh: An Interactive Hieroglyph Exhibit for PBS

PBS built an Ancient Egypt exhibition around pharaohs, artefacts and the writing system that carried their names for three thousand years. Hieroglyphs are the part of that story every visitor recognises and almost nobody can read.

That gap is the opportunity. A wall panel can explain that hieroglyphs record sounds rather than pictures. Very few people stop to read it. Far more will find out by spelling their own name.

We designed and developed the interactive touchscreen application that does exactly that. A visitor walks up to a large-format screen in the gallery, builds their name out of carved glyph tiles, watches it resolve into a cartouche, and walks away with a printed card carrying their name in hieroglyphs.

The complete digital execution: the concept, the interface design, the 3D and motion work on screen, the translation logic, and the software build that runs unattended in the gallery.

The interaction is a piece of teaching disguised as a game. The visitor is given a grid of carved tiles rather than a keyboard. Tapping a tile reveals the letter behind the glyph, and dragging it upward builds the name one sound at a time. By the third or fourth letter the visitor has worked out for themselves that these symbols stand for sounds, which is the entire educational point of the exhibit, arrived at without anyone reading it off a panel.

The finished name assembles into a cartouche, the oval that enclosed a royal name in Egyptian inscription, and prints as a museum-branded card on the spot.

A screen in a gallery has no booking system, no briefing and no host. It gets a family of five, then a school group, then somebody using it only because it stands between them and the exit.

That sets the design constraints. The instruction has to fit into one sentence on screen. The interface has to serve a child's reach and an adult's eye line on the same panel, with high contrast and large targets that survive warm gallery lighting and a screen covered in fingerprints. A session has to be short enough to keep a queue moving, and the application has to reset itself cleanly when somebody wanders off halfway through, because a good share of visitors will.

None of that shows up in a screenshot. All of it is the difference between an exhibit that runs every opening hour and one the front-of-house staff quietly switch off.

The screen holds a visitor for a minute or two. The card goes into a coat pocket, ends up on a fridge door, and gets shown to somebody who was never in the building.

Automated print output was built directly into the software workflow, so the card comes out branded, correctly composed and finished the moment the name is. No staff step, no email capture, no app to download, nothing standing between the visitor and the thing they came away with.

That is the cheapest reach an exhibition can buy, and it is the part most interactive installations leave out. A digital experience that ends the moment the visitor stops touching the screen has thrown away its best asset.

The pattern has nothing to do with Egypt. It applies wherever a subject is genuinely interesting but stays abstract on a panel, and where an interaction can make the visitor do the thing instead of read about it.

Any collection with a writing system, a classification, a process or a language behind it can be taught this way. So can a product with real engineering behind it that a brochure flattens into bullet points. We run the same structure across visitor attractions and B2B, from immersive visitor experiences for zoos and attractions to experience marketing for manufacturers, and it is the reason we argue that most immersive experiences fail to bring visitors back when they stop at spectacle.

Touchscreen was the right format here, and it often is. It needs no headset, no onboarding and no supervision, and it will keep running through every opening hour of a six-month exhibition.