Snowy Hydro Discovery Centre Immersive Theatre

The Snowy Hydro Discovery Centre in Cooma, NSW, has been the centre for engagement and education across the Snowy Hydro-electric Scheme since the 1960s.

For the 2019 seventy-year anniversary, Snowy Hydro embarked on a major uplift of the Cooma centre, with the development of the flagship digital installation, “The Immersive Theatre”.

QUT partnered with Snowy Hydro at the outset and assisted the business to develop technology concepts, user experience studies, and investment proposals, resulting the major renovation of the Centre’s auditorium to create an immersive, large-scale, digital interactive space for the next generation of Snowy employees, tourists, students, community members, and stakeholders.

QUT performed as Principal Consultant for the User Experience Design, digital content design and technology engineering of the Immersive Theatre and collaborated with architects, interior designers, and builders to deliver the site on-time and on-budget.

The hero of the Immersive theatre is the “The Snowy Hydro Story”, an expansive, cinematic journey through the Snowy Mountains and the national building history of the Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme. Guided across the magnificent mountain ranges by one of the Discovery Centre staff, visitors take a virtual flyover of the Snowy Scheme and delve into the Snowy story, which highlights our past, present and future. The experience takes visitors behind the scenes to view tunnels, dams and hydro-power stations, and to look back at where the Snowy Hydro story began. The current feature experience reflects on Snowy Hydro’s proud history and their future. Visitors are treated to amazing vistas and never seen before archival imagery and film, thanks to the partnership with the National Archives of Australia.

Since opening, hundreds of visitors a week pass through the Centre to experience the Immersive Theatre, and from 2021 even more development will take place to build on it’s huge success.