Who controls what a building says
When a building speaks to the public — a lobby wall, a wayfinding screen, an interactive installation — it speaks in its owner’s voice, and someone is accountable for every word. Too often the content is baked into the software, the software belongs to whoever built it, and within a few years the owner is negotiating with a vendor to change its own content. We hold our work to a different test: the digital layer of a building is the owner’s infrastructure, so what it says is the owner’s to govern.
No lock-in, in any direction
A building’s digital layer is never one company’s work. The displays come from one manufacturer, the LED processors from another, the players, audio and projectors from three more. Many platforms run only their own brand’s hardware, which lets one manufacturer’s catalog decide what the owner may buy next. Galaxy watches all of it as one system, whatever the label on the front, and controls what each piece allows to be controlled. A new kind of device is an addition, not a replacement.
Works with
- BrightSign media players
- Q-SYS audio systems
- Samsung commercial displays
- Novastar LED processors in validation
- PJLink projectors
- Networked power controllers
- Anything else on the network reachability only
Monitoring across all of it; control for the displays, players, LED processors and power controllers. Names describe compatibility, not endorsement or partnership.
The same holds for the people who made the experience. One venue’s surfaces rarely come from one team: the interactives may be built by different studios, and new content arrives from a creative team in another city. A building outlives all of them, and the owner shouldn’t have to start over when any one changes. Galaxy is built so that software written by another studio can report in and be operated the same way as ours, so the creative team can change without replacing the operations underneath it.
What owning the content requires
Accessibility as a condition of “done.” In Galaxy, content isn’t finished until everyone can experience it. Every image carries its description, every video its transcript, with captions alongside — and a dashboard shows, at a glance, where the gaps are. Content that can’t be experienced by everyone is visible as unfinished work, not discovered as a complaint.
Editing and showing are separate acts. Staff can change content in a workspace the public never sees. Only administrators decide when it goes live — opening morning at nine, not a minute earlier — and content can be dated to start and end on its own. The system keeps a record of who published what, and when. Published versions are kept, so an administrator can roll a mistake back in one step and the bad version stays recoverable. A banner appears whenever the working copy has moved on from what is live, including edits to shared images and videos used in many places, where changes usually slip through.
Content from visitors is gated too: at one recent brand experience, Galaxy screened every visitor drawing before it appeared on the wall, in the seconds between a visitor finishing and looking up.
Keeping it running
Whoever gets the call when a wall goes dark — facilities, IT, an AV desk, an experience manager — needs three answers fast: what is down, where it is, and when it last checked in. Galaxy puts the whole building on one board, lets a restart or power-cycle be sent from the desk before anyone is dispatched, and keeps the monthly uptime record for the day someone asks. Owners and managers can be given a read-only view of the same board. The software is the part most tools miss. They can tell you a display is on, not whether the program on it is healthy, and in an interactive installation the software is the experience.
Through Starwatch, the applications running on a building’s computers — the ones written to report — send in their own account of what they are doing and what has gone wrong. The ones built to take instruction can be operated from the same dashboard: restarted, or asked to carry out a specific action. Every command is tied to the person who sent it, permitted by role, and recorded.
Ask it a question
Galaxy is built to be used by AI assistants as well as by people. Staff can ask in plain language — is anything down in the east wing right now? how often did the lobby wall go down last month? — and the assistant answers from the live system, through an open standard (the Model Context Protocol) that many AI assistants support. For now it can only answer questions; it cannot change anything. That is deliberate.
Where it runs
Galaxy runs the public displays at a university natural history museum, a major cancer center and a working port’s visitor center, and its core technology powers the interactives at one of the country’s leading art museums. Between them they welcome more than a million visitors a year. Every deployment hardens the platform the next owner inherits.
Why it exists
Spatial human-computer interaction (HCI) treats the digital layer of a building as infrastructure with a 12+ year operational life. Content is where that promise usually breaks: a static installation is out of date the day it opens, and a system built for websites has no idea what a room is. Galaxy is the layer that lets the story keep evolving for a decade and beyond — updated by its owner, governed by its owner, accountable to its owner.