PROJECT STORY
Story Factory Studios won a competitive tender to turn one of the oldest, simplest forms of play, the marble game, into a gallery-scale spectacle for The Strong National Museum of Play, big enough to anchor the museum's new main floor gallery devoted to the history of marbles. The result, Marble Speedway, sends six custom billiard balls hurtling through 350 feet of continuous track and twenty-four interactive elements, from gates and bumpers to a full-scale whirlpool, while visitors race for position at six arcade-style kiosks and spectators follow the action on a 26-foot live-video display.

Building an exhibit that is also its own structure meant treating show design and engineering as one problem rather than two: Story Factory Studios owned the track's geometry, guarding, sightlines, and scenic treatment from concept through fabrication, prototyping ball weight, material, and obstacle behaviour by hand until the race felt right, while coordinating a machine-learning ball-tracking and edge-computing system delivered by creative technology partner Fire Burns Up. The exhibit had to run continuously, all day, every day, with minimal staff intervention, and installation proceeded inside a museum that rarely closed its doors.