The wall becomes a window.

A video wall transforms to interactive glass, revealing an augmented layer of reality.

The wall plays video until you touch it. Then it becomes a window. At the Alameda Creek Watershed Visitors Center in Sunol, California, a custom transparent display wall built into the visitor center’s interior does exactly that: wide-screen video plays across the glass, then fades to reveal a lit, physical topographic model behind it, sized and lit to match the exact wall it lives in. The platform is modular and scales to almost any wall or room. This one was built for this one.

A custom transparent display wall, not an off-the-shelf screen.

The brief was a hard one: explain a vast, mostly inaccessible protected watershed using aerial video, interactive panoramas, animated data, and long-form text — without turning the wall into a cluttered dashboard. There was no stock display case that could do this. We fabricated the topographic model to the exact reveal depth and lighting the transparent OLED panel needed, so digital overlays land on the ridge or creek they describe instead of floating in front of it. Visitors can also send a virtual drone out over protected land the public cannot otherwise enter, following a set path with a full 360-degree view along the way. Exhibitry’s designers engineered the model, the lighting, and the glass as one assembly with the Alameda Creek team, sized specifically for this wall.

Specified into the wall, not hung on it.

The unit sits flush within a purpose-built alcove in the visitor center’s interior wall, so from across the room it reads as part of the wall’s own finish, not a screen propped in front of it. Interior lighting behind the glass is calibrated against the room’s own lighting plan, so the physical model reads correctly whether the glass is showing video or showing the terrain beneath. Sightlines are set for a room that gets school groups and solo hikers on the same afternoon, and the interface is built accessible so visitors of different heights and abilities can reach and read it without help. Content updates remotely, so new trail data or seasonal change reaches the wall without anyone opening the case.

The best surface in the room isn’t a screen. It’s a window you didn’t know was there.

Exhibitry — on designing for the built environment

We engineered the same logic into the space-capsule displays at Kennedy Space Center, where edge-lit acrylic walls hold transparent touchscreens flush against real spacecraft, and into a carbon-management exhibit we built for a major oil and gas company in Houston.

A screen set in front of a room is furniture. A screen specified into the room’s own wall is architecture.

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