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Project Name
Colors of Creation, by FELT Design.
Colors of Creation is a 28-minute color-drenched, immersive experience at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History that places families at the center of an unfolding story of the universe’s creation. The project’s aim is to reinforce the idea that the natural world is a wondrous gift, and its care is our collective responsibility.
Type Of Project
Architainment/Immersive Experience
Design Criteria
The design brief was intentionally broad: transform a static museum lobby into a joyful, immersive destination for children and families, and reintroduce the Weitzman as a place for exploration, discovery, and play, where stories come alive in wondrous ways.
FELT responded with two interconnected experiences. "Colors of Creation," the centerpiece, is a 360° immersive journey through the creation of the universe, combining concert-style lighting, interactive projections, and an original musical score that shifts, layers, and transforms in real time with visitors’ movements.
Adjacent to the immersive gallery, "The Color Lab" brings that spirit of discovery into a tactile, hands-on environment for younger visitors. Peg walls, tactile wheels, magnetic puzzles, and light tables invite children to experiment freely with color, light, and pattern, creating compositions entirely their own.
Project Description
Visitors enter a darkened room that transforms around them into an ever-evolving, multi-surface cinematic canvas. Moving imagery, floor projections, synchronized lighting, multichannel sound, and responsive technology work together as the environment awakens, grows, and changes. The 28-minute experience unfolds across eight distinct cinematic ecosystems, each structured in three acts and filled with opportunities for visitor interactions to shape the world as it unfolds.
A visitor’s gesture might send clouds across the walls or cause mushrooms to emerge from a forest floor. A step scatters luminous fish across the surface of a pond. A wave of an arm creates a field of stars. A jump in the air releases a burst of butterflies. A stomp makes footprints that could be a dinosaur’s or an elephant’s. Each interaction generates something new, ensuring that no two visits, or even two moments, are exactly alike.
"Colors of Creation" is not a world playing on a loop. It is a world in a continual state of emergence, shaped by the people within it.
Challenges And Solutions
One challenge the client presented to FELT at the start of the project was the observation that many immersive environments are visually spectacular but fundamentally passive, or offer only a handful of predetermined interactions. Colors of Creation was designed instead as a responsive system. Using 3D LiDAR sensing, visitors’ position, speed, and gestures continuously affect imagery, lighting, and sound. Rather than simply triggering a fixed animation, their movements generate and alter elements within the environment: clouds form and drift, fish scatter, stars appear, and landscapes change. When a group of people interact with a trigger zone, a different result is generated than if that same zone sensed only one individual. The result is an immersive narrative that is never experienced in exactly the same way twice. Visitors are not simply surrounded by the story; their presence directly shapes it.
Each interaction generates something new, ensuring that no two visits, or even two moments, are exactly alike."
Another challenge was creating a genuinely intergenerational experience, accessible to very young pre-readers as well as adults and older visitors. FELT intentionally designed interactions that require no instructions, reading, or specialized knowledge. Fundamental physical actions like walking, waving, reaching, and jumping produce immediate and legible responses in the environment. Color, movement, music, and sound carry the emotional arc of the story, allowing visitors to understand the experience intuitively and participate at their own level. The adjacent Color Lab extends this approach for younger children through tactile, open-ended activities including peg walls, magnetic puzzles, tactile wheels, and light tables.
FELT was also tasked with creating an experience housed in a Jewish museum that welcomes visitors across faith traditions, and incorporates scientific principles into the story of creation. Rather than illustrating a single religious text literally, the narrative draws from creation traditions shared across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures. Research into visual perception, color, and neuroscience provided another layer of common ground: color became a nonverbal language for communicating the emotional progression of the experience. Together, these approaches allowed the experience to explore creation through wonder, transformation, and our relationship to the natural world without requiring visitors to share a particular belief system.
A final challenge was the project’s unusually small and geographically dispersed creative team. Team members worked remotely from different parts of the country, with no core team members based in Philadelphia. FELT developed a highly collaborative workflow using shared visualization, animation, sound, and prototyping tools to design and evaluate the experience remotely. Multiple trips to Philadelphia brought the team together in the actual space for full-scale prototyping and user testing, allowing observations of real visitor behavior to directly inform the design.
Equipment
“Colors” uses 3D LiDAR to track visitor movement in real time. A custom TouchDesigner application converts this data into live commands for visuals, lighting, and sound—so every action shapes the experience. Interactions were tested in a virtual model using Capture, enabling rapid iteration. A 12.4-channel immersive soundscape runs on a real-time audio engine built in Max.
Creative Team
- Ariel Efron, Creative Lead
- David Crumley, Technical Lead
- Chris Carlson, Composer, Sound Design Lead
- Christine Murray, Narrative Design
- Julie Flechoux, Visual Design