SOAP, SUDS, AND SCIENCE

Explore & More Children’s Museum

A Trip to the Car Wash

The Explore & More Children’s Museum in Buffalo selected Boss Display to create interactive educational exhibits centered on a modern-day car wash. Working alongside the gallery’s designer, Gyroscope, Boss Display helped bring the lifesize car wash to life. The donor — Western New York’s popular car wash chain Delta Sonic — hoped to showcase the workings of its business and machinery, as well as its sustainable water recycling system. The result is a multi-sensory gallery where kids explore the science of air and water, while playing with bubbles, pumps, dryers, and vacuums.

 
 

Activated with a lever, the operator wash area lets guests simulate cleaning a model car with soap and suds.

Experience vacuums on a whole other scale as scarves are sent flying through the maze of tubes.

Heat activated, color changing paint allows guests to “dry“ the car after it goes through the wash.

 
 

Building the Experience

For adults and children alike, the car wash is an experience filled with unique sights and sounds: soapy jets and suds, swirling oversized brushes, and loud blowers that push away the water drops. Our team of designers and engineers transformed these quintessential car-wash elements into engaging learning opportunities. A vehicle drying display, for example, becomes a science lesson on heat exchange as guests blast warm air to “dry” a model Volkswagen Beetle, which turns from blue to yellow thanks to special heat-activated paint.

 
 

Load the scarves into the feed hole on the vacuum and activate it with the push of a button.

Children marvel as they send their scarves through the maze of tubes simulating a vacuum.

Interact together as you pass through the car wash flaps into the immersive wash area!

 
 

Imaginative Play, Real-life Learning

Upon entering the exhibit space, children can step inside a reception kiosk to greet guests via a touch screen monitor. Kid customers then choose their own “wearable vehicle,” an over-the-head car costume to make the immersive car-wash experience all the more fun. Real car wash felt flaps separate rinse and dry areas, where dancing LEDs and warm air blowers lead guests to a zone where they can play with water gadgets.

 
 
“It was very easy to work with Boss, because it wasn’t just a job. It was ‘let’s look at this and make it the best that it can be.’ We both wanted to have the best product out there.”
— MICHELLE URBANCZYK, CEO AT EXPLORE & MORE CHILDREN’S MUSEUM
 
 

Rising to the Challenge

This complex space demanded specialized engineering to integrate the vast array of interactions. For example, pre-programmed LED lights, air blowers, and choreographed video projections needed to be synced within a unified system for the drive-through car wash display. Other new technologies, like color-changing paint in the car drying area, required extensive prototyping to find safe and effective temperatures that properly showed the drying effect. At the end of this detailed design and build process, Boss Display unveiled a gallery that fuses technology and engineering to create a unique first-hand experience of the everyday science all around us.

 
 

Check in at the reception desk area, complete with a full touchscreen, before entering the car wash.

In the operator wash section, visitors can control the flow of water as it washes the model yellow car.

Features:

  • Reception kiosk play area with touch screen monitors to welcome guests

  • Immersive car wash experience features projected videos that look out onto cleaning machines through a car window

  • Walk-through rinse and dry zones recreate a car wash experience with special lighting, air movers, and mirrors

  • Car drying exhibit in which guests use hoses to blow warm air onto a model Volkswagen Beetle covered in a paint that turns from a shade of blue (representing wet) to yellow (representing dry)

 

  • Interactive wash and rinse sections have visitors pump and control jets of water around a series of moving obstacles and model VW cars, as colorful LED lights dance across the roof of the exhibit

  • A “vacuum wall” where guests feed scarves into an opening that shoots the fabric through a tangle of clear air tubes

  • A large rotating wall display that drops small balls down a grated metal track, showing how contaminants are removed in a water recycling system

 
 

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