Case Study: The Walmart Museum
How The Walmart Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas increased worldwide access to Walmart heritage, provides global educational field trips, and boosts consumer awareness using an immersive virtual tour designed by Shining Star Interactive LLC.
Primary Areas of Service
• Virtual Tour Design
• SEO Optimization
• HDR Photography
• eLearning Design
• Brand Marketing
• Gamification
• Language Translations
• Graphic Design
• Overview
The Walmart Museum faced several problems when it came to sharing their highly interactive and rich historical exhibits online and in a virtual manner. Much of the museum is designed to be experienced in person, on site. They wanted to share the rich heritage of how Sam Walton built his business from the ground up. With Walmart being a global company today, they wanted to share this across the world. Additionally, many schools use Sam’s business legacy as a model of study, yet so many students are unable to see the museum due to distance. Field trips are mainly limited to nearby schools. Lastly, with Covid19, the Museum wanted a way to keep open and continue to share the story of Walmart with the public, suppliers, and associates of Walmart.
The overarching challenge was how to bring all of this information and experiential content to the masses off site and virtually.
• The Shining Star Interactive Approach
Shining Star Interactive team created an immersive virtual tour of the museum that not only showcased the spaces of the museum, but included the built in exhibits where folks can examine the displays as if they are truly there.
Viewers can roam about the museum, stop at exhibit cases and look at items in the case. Using high resolution imagery, they can get a close up view of each item just as they would in person. Each item has it’s unique story and history listed. There is built in audio tour guide that leads you through the museum and tells the story of Sam and his legacy. Embedded videos that normally play in the museum are included and played as guests make their way around the spaces. There is even a trivia game at the end to test your knowledge of Walmart, and when you get to Sam Walton’s Ford F150 pickup truck, you can sit inside it and get a driver’s view right down to the chew marks on the steering wheel from Sam’s dog.
The entire tour is branded to reflect the Walmart identity, and the corporate color scheme is dominant throughout the tour. A focus on a guided tour experience is enhanced with a navigational flow that mimics a group led tour by a guide providing a story based experience as you make your way though the museum. A unique feature for school field trips allows for a teacher or museum staff to interact with viewers in a video conference style manner and even control the screens of all viewers to provide a truly live guided group tour. Analytics have been woven into the architecture to provide measurable key performance indicators and the ability to know more about the demographics of the online visitors.
The tour is currently being expanded into multiple languages such as Chinese and Spanish to allow a true global reach.
ENGAGING
DESIGN
AND
IMMERSIVE
TECHNOLOGY
USED TO
BRING THE
WALMART
STORY TO
THE WORLD.
• Conclusion
The Walmart Museum is able to share the rich history and heritage of Sam Walton and the Walmart legacy with people across the world. School students everywhere can visit the museum and see things first hand. Walmart employees and suppliers across the globe can visit the museum virtually to learn about the company and it’s founder. The story of Sam Walton and Walmart are memorialized digitally forever. The virtual tour has increased the number of visitors to the museum via virtual visits and continues to be a valuable resource in education, history, and corporate heritage.
Take a look at The Walmart Museum
Explore the finished project. A robust, immersive, and interactive virtual tour of The Walmart Museum exhibits and facility. This will open the Walmart Museum website. Click on the Virtual Tour option to view.