The Official New York City Information Center
The perfect trip to New York City starts here.
Overview
The Official NYC Information Center integrates architecture and media into a seamless experience that helps guide New York City visitors to places they know about, and lets them discover new parts of the city they didn't know existed.
Partners
WXY Architects
Services
Media Design, Media & Software Development
The Details
The center offers visitors a range of options for engagement. Using vertical touch screens, visitors can get answers to 100 frequently-asked questions in any of ten languages. Visitors looking to explore can create a custom guide to New York by turning to a bank of three large interactive map tables that allow visitors to search for local experiences, and craft their own itinerary out of NYC&Co.'s extensive database.
Experience your journey, then take it with you
Visitors may take their custom itineraries on the road through print, email, or text message. A large projection called “flyNYC” gives visitors an aerial view of their prospective journey.
Ahead of its time
Built in 2009, the Official NYC Visitor Center allowed Local Projects to introduce technological and UX ideas that would become standards for our work. All of the interactive installations used the same content management system, simplifying operations and ensuring that digital content would never get lost outside of a central repository. We also used image recognition to create some of the first “smart objects” in the experience design space, before technologies like beacons and RFID became more widely used and understood.