The wrong-shaped-tools problem
Every discipline eventually needs its own instruments. Web tooling assumes a browser, an operating system, and a user who configured both. Game tooling assumes a player who chose to be there, owns the hardware, and restarts when something breaks. A public interactive gets none of that: a stranger who walked up mid-experience, a machine nobody in the building administers, and no one to press restart. Those aren’t edge cases to patch — they’re the defining conditions of the domain, and they have to live in the toolkit.
What that looks like in practice
A self-voicing interface, because there is no screen reader. Digital accessibility everywhere else leans on assistive technology the user brings — a screen reader configured on their own machine. A visitor at a gallery kiosk has no such thing, and a game engine draws pictures a screen reader couldn’t read anyway. So Fusion makes the interface voice itself: every description is turned into speech and ready before the first visitor arrives, and every interface can be driven entirely by simple directional controls — the foundation for switch and keypad access. The screen reader’s job, rebuilt inside the engine, because in public space accessibility must be engineered into the interaction layer — the visitor can’t bring their own.
The rhythms of a public room. Idle detection resets the experience between visitors — every person who walks up finds the beginning, not the last visitor’s leftovers — with attract states and warnings tuned per installation.
The institution’s content, not the software’s. What a Fusion installation says comes from Galaxy, and a local copy means it keeps running when the network doesn’t — so the institution changes the story without anyone touching the software, and the room never goes dark waiting for a connection.
Made to be operated. Every installation keeps a record of what happened, measures how visitors actually use it, and carries a built-in service menu for the people who look after it — because a system designed for a 12+ year life has to be understandable and serviceable by people who didn’t build it.
Why it exists
You can tell a discipline is real when general-purpose tools start failing it in consistent, nameable ways. Fusion is that list of failures, answered: the accumulated corrections spatial HCI requires of a real-time engine before it can be trusted in a public building — collected once, hardened across every installation, so no project starts from a tool shaped for somewhere else.