What we built in 2024

2024 was an exciting year for Pladia. As a newly launched platform, we’ve worked closely with customers to lay the groundwork for products that help the visitor attraction market deliver meaningful and engaging experiences.

With Empower and Event Sync, we’re just getting started. Here’s a look at the progress we’ve made so far and where we’re headed next.

Empower: Pladia’s visitor-centered solution for the cultural sector

Pladia Empower creates a digital twin of your physical environment, unlocking innovative opportunities for storytelling and navigation. By merging the physical and digital realms, we enable tailored experiences that cater to your specific needs and accommodate a diverse range of visitor needs and preferences.

Over 13 years of learnings distilled

Let’s take a step back to look at how Pladia came to be. Pladia was born out of Art Processors, an experiential design company with over 13 years of deep engagement in the cultural tourism space, working with institutions across the US and Australia crafting visitor attractions and place-based media.

Through these 13 years of innovation and collaboration, the company recognized the need for a dedicated product to empower cultural attractions to craft personalized, digital-first visitor experiences. That vision led to the launch of Pladia in September 2024.

3 tangible learnings to inform what we built in 2024

Three key tangible learnings have directly informed the development of Pladia Empower:

• ‍Lower Friction, higher uptake: With no logins or downloads required, we’ve learned that PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) offer a seamless experience that significantly reduces friction and leads to higher visitor uptake in museum environments.‍
• Adaptive visitor behavior: Visitors naturally shift from meandering to guided modes of discovery within a single visit. This dynamic behavior requires a solution that allows for fluid transitions between exploration styles.‍
• Visitor-centered design approach to wayfinding: From experience, we’ve found that a beacon-free approach to indoor digital wayfinding drastically reduces technical and maintenance overhead while providing a more effective and reliable solution for indoor navigation.

By combining these tangible learnings with the common challenges we’ve identified, we developed Pladia Empower over the course of 2024—a platform designed to enhance visitor engagement while streamlining venue operations.

What we built in 2024!

Pladia Empower transforms visitor engagement by seamlessly blending interpretive content with intuitive navigation. This unique combination sets our solution apart.

• Interpretive content: Your app can help visitors connect with your venue in meaningful ways. Whether offering tangible information — like details on the menu at the café — or providing audio commentary about a specific space or object, your content enriches their experience.
• Beacon-free wayfinding: Our solution acknowledges the fluid nature of visitor behavior, allowing them to effortlessly shift between meandering exploration and guided discovery throughout their visit.

By merging these elements, Pladia Empower delivers a dynamic, engaging experience that adapts to both visitor needs, and the venue’s offerings.

In 2025, we will continue building on our storytelling and navigation capabilities to allow cultural institutions to create the ultimate digital companion for their venue. Check out our roadmap to come along on the journey!

Event Sync: Addressing the challenges of live events

Event Sync is designed to help event organizers deliver synchronized audio experiences that are simple to set up and accessible to diverse audiences. Over the past year, we’ve focused on tackling the technical and logistical challenges of using web-based apps at live events.

Built for resilience

Reliability remains a top priority, especially considering the low or unstable network conditions typical of festivals and events. Key improvements include:

1. Long audio file support
   Resolved sync issues associated with long audio files, now fully functional with no maximum length.
2. Pre-loading
   Audio content is pre-loaded when launching the PWA, reducing the strain on local networks. Unlike typical streaming platforms, audience members don’t have to buffer all at once when the show begins, ensuring smoother performance.
3. Comprehensive compatibility
   The Progressive Web App (PWA) enables attendees to listen instantly via a QR code, with no downloads required. Ensuring reliability across a broad range of devices and browsers required immense attention to detail to meet the high standards our customers expect.

Meeting diverse needs with sync options

Customer feedback revealed two primary use cases for Event Sync:

1. Precise synchronization
   For AV professionals, UDP and SMPTE LTC deliver professional-grade accuracy with seamless integration through the Event Sync Desktop App. If there’s an alternative integration that would better suit your setup, we’d love to hear from you.
2. Ease of use
   Manual mode offers non-technical users a simple way to press play and sync audio at the start of their show. It’s an ideal option for soundtracks not tied to a visual display.

By keeping these workflows distinct, we’ve balanced advanced functionality with simplicity, ensuring uncompromised quality for professionals seeking precise AV synchronization while making the product accessible to others.

Exploring accessibility

We’ve taken steps toward making Event Sync more inclusive:

1. Transcripts
   Introduced for hearing-impaired audiences, allowing customers to provide accessible text versions of audio content. Adding a transcript is straightforward — simply paste the text into the Console, and it will display in the PWA.
2. Dynamic design system
   Pladia’s mobile design system prioritizes inclusivity, allowing customers to configure their PWA branding without compromising readability. The system dynamically adapts to ensure text remains legible, even on custom background images.

If you have specific accessibility goals, we’d love to hear from you and explore how we can support them.

Looking ahead: Multi-event management

In 2025, we plan to introduce the ability to plan and manage multiple events within Event Sync. By streamlining workflows, this feature will free users to focus on higher-priority tasks during events, making Event Sync even more adaptable to complex schedules and large-scale productions.

New to Event Sync? Learn more.

What’s next for Pladia?

This year was just the beginning. We’re committed to refining Empower and Event Sync, while continuing to develop new features to better support our customers. As we build tools to meet the evolving needs of cultural organizations and live event organizers, we’ll keep sharing updates and insights along the way.

We’re also excited to introduce Pladia Extend, a new product line designed for authoring and publishing content to digital displays. Pladia Extend builds on the foundation of our existing content and design system, seamlessly integrating with the Pladia platform. For Empower customers, this will mean repurposing existing content for digital displays with minimal effort, simplifying the publishing process, and making it more efficient.

We’d love to hear your feedback as we continue shaping Pladia Extend into a tool that meets your needs. Learn more and get in touch here.

As we continue building Pladia, customer feedback remains central to how we prioritize our work. If you’re curious about what’s next, visit our public roadmap to share your thoughts, vote on features, or leave comments.