Digital Legacy
1996 Cyber Pub – Virtual Museum of Advertising
Cyber Pub—the first virtual museum of advertising—was conceived at a time when interactive media was exploring spatial and experiential models long before the web adopted them. Initiated by Jacques Séguéla, founder of RSCG, the project set out to document the history of advertising through a medium that mirrored the act of discovery itself: a navigable digital space.
Client
Magic Media (BE)
Jacques Séguéla (FR)
Services
Interaction Design
Digital Design
I worked on the project as a digital designer, contributing to an experience built entirely around a virtual museum. Using QuickTime VR (QTVR), users could enter and move through a three-dimensional, non-existent building, navigating by clicking hotspots embedded in the environment. Advertising campaigns were not listed or indexed; they were encountered—displayed as posters on walls, grouped by brand, and activated through interaction.
Each brand space introduced its own interactive logic. Campaigns were revealed through playful, contextual mechanisms—such as Volvo’s crash-test dummy opening and closing poster displays—linking brand identity, narrative, and interface design. Spread across two CD-ROMs, the project brought together around 70 videos and more than a thousand posters and advertising artifacts, forming a dense, explorable archive rather than a linear catalogue.
Seen in retrospect, Cyber Pub stands as an early exploration of immersive information design and spatial navigation—years before concepts such as virtual museums, experiential UX, or digital twins entered mainstream discourse. Projects of this scale required full multidisciplinary teams and long development cycles, with deep experimentation in interaction design and user experience—UI/UX before the term existed.
