Touring Exhibitions, creator of Abbaworld, has built a new audioguide from scratch to facilitate the highly interactive touring exhibition, which has already been in London, UK and is currently showing in Melbourne, Australia.

The Touring Exhibitions Player (TXP) is an essential part of the exhibition, allowing visitors to point at an object and have information play automatically.

Touring Exhibitions decided to design its own guide when, after some research, the company couldn't find a guide on the market to suit its purposes. "The entire point of Abbaworld was to get people to interact. It's more like going to Mamma Mia the musical than a traditional exhibition," said Touring Exhibitions president Magnus Danielsson. "People are singing and dancing throughout the exhibitions, so we wanted to have a very easy system, easy for children and uncomplicated. With a lot of other systems on the market, it's like a big remote control in your hand and you feel like you're missing out on parts of the exhibition because you don't have time to learn all its functions."

As this was Touring Exhibitions' first time creating a guide, there were challenges, Danielsson notes, but a team consisting of in-house staff and partners on the technical side were able to successfully create the product, which Danielsson describes as more like a game controller than an audioguide. "I would more compare it to a Wii game controller or an iPod gadget. It's more of a cool gadget than it is a traditional square audioguide." It works through RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, allowing visitors to interact with different objects through radio transmitters.

Touring Exhibitions is marketing the guide to other attractions, and it will launch in at least one, possibly two museums this summer, Danielsson says. "That was not the intention when we developed it, but there's been a lot of interest, so we've decided to make it available."