The Famous Grouse experience invests £500,000 in new state-of-the-art interactive show

The Famous Grouse Experience, Scotland’s most visited distillery, has invested half a million pounds to create a brand new interactive 3-D show using pioneering new technology to take visitors into the world of The Famous Grouse.

The new show will launch on 2nd July 2009 and follows on from the first, hugely successfully show, which first opened seven years ago and was awarded a BAFTA for Best Interactive Entertainment in 2002.

Using cutting edge ‘gesture technology’, the new show provides a higher level of interaction than before, with the grouse directly responding to movements and gestures made by the guide and show participants – the first time that this type of technology has been used in this way anywhere in the world.

On entering the show visitors are first introduced to The Famous Grouse before embarking on a spectacular flight across Scotland taking in some of the country’s most famous landmarks including Eilean Donan and the Forth Rail Bridge, and landing on the set of The Famous Grouse’s iconic TV adverts.

Finally, visitors are taught how to fly the grouse themselves, and by mimicking the grouse in flight they can direct the bird. They are then invited to guide the grouse through a glen picking up musical notes along the way to create the popular grouse tune.

Tracy McCafferty, General Manager, The Famous Grouse Experience commented: “We are particularly proud of our track record in delivering an outstanding visitor experience and despite the current economic climate; we feel it is important to continually invest in our visitor centre to ensure we maintain this record. The interactive show is one of the most popular parts of the distillery tour and with a greater number of people expected to holiday at home this year we hope this gives people another reason to visit the home of Scotland’s favourite whisky. “

The show has been created by German based Art+com, specialists in interactive projects that use the very latest digital technology. They have developed a technically unique show, supporting multi-person interaction and combining real-time 3D with photo realism in a multi-channel format.

The overall image projected on the wall and the floor consists of approximately 3.000 times 3.000 pixels. Most scenes contain high-resolution satellite images of famous landmarks in Scotland. A major technical challenge from a software engineering point of view consisted in the real-time rendering of the complex 3D scenes and the synchronization of the workstations to guarantee judder-free images and low-latency interactivity.

The Famous Grouse Experience, based at Scotland’s oldest distillery, Glenturret, receives over 100,000 visitors a year. The visitor attraction has received a number of prestigious awards in recent years including two consecutive Thistle Awards in 2007 and 2008, for People Development and Customer Service respectively. This was followed by two Gold awards at the Perthshire Chamber of Commerce Star Awards for Customer Service and Retail in November 2008.

For further information about The Experience please visit: www.thefamousgrouse.com/experience.

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