2024 | Johann Strauss Museum – New Dimensions | Vienna

The Johann Strauss Museum in Vienna is a multimedia and interactive celebration of the world-famous waltz composer, who is regarded as the first pop star in world history and is revered as a genius. To mark his 200th birthday in 2025, the museum with the permanent exhibition ‘New Dimensions’ was realised on private initiative, making use of usomo. 

The Waltz King is staged in a special way with usomo. His spectacular compositions can be experienced even more intensively in all of their full-bodied richness with our immersive headphone-based sound system. The scenography is structured in seven acts, which unfold one after the other and end in a brilliant finale, the ‘Immersive Space’. Visitors are led by usomo, following their hearing from room to room through the sonic universe of Johann Strauss, where his music, his life and his time are unlocked to them in fluid scene changes and with a number of interactive special features.

For usomo, the project was once again an expansion of our own scope of possibilities, as we were able to secure the functionality of our tracking system in a challenging room situation over two floors with a labyrinthine spatial layout around many corners. We also realised some unique special features: In the film projection on all four walls and the floor in the ‘immersive space’, an orchestra plays, whose individual instruments react individually to the visitors and become louder as they approach, so that one can focus on this instrument when listening and perceive its sound more distinctly. At a station with Strauss’s family members, a text is narrated by them with individual voices tracked to each portrait that seamlessly blend into the next. AI was used in the development of this station. Another new feature is that visitors can pause the spoken text in order to experience purely the musical layer.


Credits

Website
johannstraussmuseum.at

Client
Ostrich Eventagentur GmbH, Vienna

Idea
Peter Hosek

Concept & Realisation
Media Apparat GmbH, Vienna

Technical Partner
Habegger Austria GmbH

Programming, Media Server
Bildwerk OG

Exhibition Architecture
Christian Sturminger

Spatial Sound System
usomo by FRAMED immersive projects GmbH & Co. KG

usomo Tasks
Integration of the tracking system, spatial sound concept, spatial sound production

Duration
Permanent exhibition opened in November 2024

Photos
© Philipp Lipiarski