1996 CYBER PUB, the first virtual museum of advertising

The first virtual museum of advertising by Jacques Seguéla

Cyber Pub was a CD-Rom project about the history of advertising. It was built around a ‘virtual’ museum. You could enter and walk through a 3D rendering of a nonexisting building by means of the then-revolutionary application called QTVR (QuickTime VR). The project was initiated by Jacques Seguéla, the founder of RSCG. The QTVR allowed an entirely new way of navigating by clicking on hotspots throughout the building. You could explore some of the world-famous advertising campaigns of the last decennia by clicking on posters (representations of the campaigns) on the walls.

Each brand had a specific place that included several campaigns and for each brand, a certain ‘trouvaille’ was built in. For Volvo for example there was an interactive crash test dummy opening and closing the campaign posters. The title had about 70 videos and over a thousand posters and advertising material spread out over two CD-Roms. “2 CD-ROM pour le prix d’un”! Two CDs for the price of one was the promotional tagline.

An amazingly innovative piece of multimedia that shows again that, even before the web became such a popular place, there was already a great deal of interactive media on the market in the form of Games and CD-Roms. These were large projects (one project would approximately take a full team of about a year to finalize) with experimental user interface design and deeper user experience research (UI/UX ‘avant la lettre’) than most of the web and app projects of today.