Display Technology

Montana Heritage Center taps LED video, audiovisual tech for immersive history journey

The center is using LED video technology and audiovisual elements in an interactive environment that educates visitors on the state’s earliest inhabitants through to modern times.

Photo: SNA Displays

August 13, 2026 by Judy Mottl — Editor: RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com, Connect Media

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The Montana Heritage Center, in Helena, Montana, boasts a unique visitor experience that few other museums offer — a fully immersive journey through the state's history that combines storytelling, technology and architecture.

Located a block from the state's capitol building, the center is using LED video technology and audiovisual elements in an interactive environment that educates visitors on the state's earliest inhabitants through to modern times.

How the immersive journey came about

SNA Displays, a LED video display manufacturer teamed with Electrosonic, an international audiovisual and technology services provider to create the museum experience.

Electrosonic tapped SNA Displays as it had worked with the company on many projects, according to Alex Westerh, vice president, global marketing, at Electrosonic.

"Electrosonic believes the folks at SNA Displays are some of the best in the business," Westerh said in an email interview.

"We have worked with SNA Displays team for many years in delivering some of the most incredible uses of technology around the country. SNA Displays is known for their innovation in LED and we chose them as our project partner at the Montana Heritage Center because we knew that they would bring the right technical expertise and product to meet the needs of our client."

Electrosonic designed a comprehensive and integrated AV ecosystem in which sound, light and motion respond to visitors. SNA Displays supplied custom video walls and slim vertical displays that define key gallery moments. SNA Displays manufactured and supplied 42 display faces across nine exhibits using a mix of 1.2, 1.9, and 2.5-milimeter interior LED video technology.

Digital design studio RLMG created dynamic interactive and media content tailored to each display.

The experience allows museum visitors to see and hear stories, often told in the original sovereign nations' languages, while standing amid depictions of wildlife, mining tunnels, open roads and more.

What the experience offers

Guests enter the museum through Washington Way at the entrance of the Homeland Gallery. In honor of American industrialist Dennis Washington, this cinematic passage surrounds story-seekers with coordinated projection, LED fissures and an LED ceiling display that curves like a flowing river.

Visitors are greeted by the veins in the stone, with embedded LED that makes them appear to flow like water. An overhead LED river leads visitors into the first gallery featuring a large curved overhead display that welcomes guests and offers information on what the museum is all about.

A key exhibit features a sweeping concave dvLED wall called Moving Through Time which uses visuals that move in sync with the gallery's immersive soundscape. The Sovereign Nations Tipi includes motion sensors and touchpoints to trigger origin tales and scenes of village life that play in sync with sound and lighting.

A highlight for visitors is the Mineshaft Experience where visitors step into a mine elevator car, pull the rope to start their shift and ride down into the deep well, stopping along the way to view restored archival footage as well as digital recreations of the people, activities and conditions in the mine. Interactive touchscreens tell personal stories, while the LED videowalls, spatial audio and synchronized lighting recreate life underground. This immersive technology simulates a shaking floor and plunges guests into the reality of Montana's mining history.

Best practices for success

Crafting and building an immersive experience is no small or quick feat. A critical part of the plan, according to Paul England, senior director, design solutions at SNA Displays, is designing in robustness with minimal maintenance.

"Often, museums have budget for building exhibits but maintenance falls into a different bucket. Furthermore, typical museum operations staffing is not usually well-suited to maintaining complex technology, and you potentially have a recipe for disaster in the long term," England said in an email interview.

That's why designing persistent exhibits that will work for ages with little to no maintenance is highly important.

"Second, you want to ensure you're bringing on partners with plenty of museum experience. Not are there the maintenance requirements I mentioned earlier, but there are considerations such as how guests interact with exhibits, fitness of the display for the facility and a host of other things that can fail if the exhibit designer, the fabricators and the technology partners aren't aligned on the big picture," England said.

Photos courtesy of SNA Displays

About Judy Mottl

Judy Mottl is the editor of RetailCustomerExperience.com and DigitalSignageToday.com at Connect Media. She is an award-winning editor, reporter and blogger who has worked for top media for nearly four decades, including AOL, InformationWeek and Internet News, as well as for leading technology providers including HP. She’s written everything from breaking news to in-depth industry trends and reported on technology long before the internet arrived, including the debut of the first smartphone. When she's not sharing insights on digital signage deployments and trends in retail customer experience she's on the beach or watching the latest live murder trial.

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