Permanent exhibition · Hall: Living Room III

Museum of the Year 3026

The kids exhibit ordinary things from the house. An archaeologist from the year 3026 prints a serious museum label for each one and gets it wrong.

Age: Whole family. The 6-year-old curates too.
Players: Two curators, a parent with a phone, visitors
Cost: 1,300–2,000 CZK (about €50–80)
AI: Claude as the archaeologist, whisper.cpp on the Mac
Build: Printed pedestals, posts and counter, ESP32, USB mic, thermal printer

On viewThings from the house, labels from the future

Ordinary things from the house go on printed pedestals behind a cotton rope. A child holds the button on the counter and describes the thing: its color, what it’s made of, where it was found and how it smells. What it’s for stays a secret.

Claude plays an archaeologist from the year 3026. It offers three serious labels full of mistakes and keeps building the whole collection into one wrong theory about the inhabitants of Living Room III. The child picks a label, the thermal printer prints it, and the exhibit stays on the shelf for a week. When visitors come, the kids give the tour as curators. Later an audio guide can play the archaeologist’s commentary to them.

Hall I

Play a round

Five things from our house wait in the box. Pick one, hold the yellow button while the child describes it, choose a label on the counter and confirm the print on the phone. The labels here are pre-written. The real archaeologist writes new ones every time and remembers the whole shelf.

Pick a thing
Hold and describe
Choose A, B or C
Confirm the print
Shelf

Printer sound

Things from the house

Color
Material
Found where
Smell

Parent modeGateway · Mac

The shelf behind the rope

Working theory

Chief Archaeologist, Year 3026

Catalog

Hall II

The wow moment

Exhibit No. 4 is a clothespin from the balcony. The catalog already holds a striped sock from under the bed, filed as The Royal Sock. Label C says the clothespin was the queen’s nose clip, worn during inspections of the royal sock.

Mom is still reading B when my 9-year-old presses C. The printer buzzes for a second and the label goes into the frame with a catalog number and a completely straight face.

Museum of the Year 3026 · Living Room III Exhibit No. 4 The Queen’s Nose Clip Worn during inspections of the royal sock. Found outside, where the court went to breathe. See also No. 3, The Royal Sock.

One round, start to finish

Son (9), holding the button“It’s black. It’s plastic with lots of small rubber buttons with numbers on them. I found it between the sofa cushions. It smells like chips.”
GatewayTranscribed by whisper.cpp, recording deleted. Catalog: 1 exhibit.
Archaeologist, on Mom’s phone A · Scepter of the Great Black RectanglePressing a button was a prayer. Between prayers the scepter was hidden deep in the sofa. Records suggest the faithful searched for it every evening. See also No. 1, Cage for a Small Spirit. B · Book of Royal LawsEach button is one law. Law 0 sits at the very bottom, closest to the queen’s only foot. C · Piano for One ThumbNumbers instead of notes. The smell of chips suggests concerts were long and the audience needed snacks.
MomReads all three aloud.
Son (9)Presses A. Mom taps print.
Working theoryThe inhabitants of Living Room III worshipped the Great Black Rectangle on the wall of the main hall. Supported by 2 exhibits: Nos. 1 and 2.

Hall III

How a round goes

The child puts a thing on the pedestal, holds the button and follows the pictures on the counter: color, material, where it was found, smell. What it’s for stays a secret.
The Mac transcribes the speech and deletes the recording. Claude, as the archaeologist from 3026, proposes three labels. It knows the earlier exhibits and keeps building one wrong theory about the inhabitants of Living Room III.
Mom or Dad reads the labels from the phone. The child picks with button A, B or C, and the parent confirms the print.
The sticker label goes into the pedestal’s frame. The exhibit stands on the shelf behind the rope for a week.
Then the label moves into the catalog, and the kids give tours as curators.
Without a network, the kids write labels themselves on pre-printed forms. Later everyone guesses which labels in the catalog the computer wrote.

Hall IV

Why a tenth time

The archaeologist reads the catalog before every label, so a sock from the first week can still be evidence in the fourth.
Describing a toothbrush without giving away what it’s for takes real thought, and the house is full of things like that.
Each pick between three wrong labels decides where the theory goes next. With two curators, every pick is a small negotiation.
Grandma and Grandpa get a new tour each time, and the curators have to explain exhibits whose labels they only half remember.
After a month the catalog is a small book of wrong history about our living room, with the handwritten offline labels mixed in for a guessing game.

Featured

What AI adds

Claude plays the archaeologist, the only visitor who has never seen a whisk. From four clues it writes three serious museum labels, each wrong in a different direction, so pressing A, B or C actually steers the story.

Before each label it reads the catalog of everything exhibited so far and fits the new thing into one theory about Living Room III. A sock from Monday and a remote from three weeks ago end up as evidence for the same queen.

The kids can write funny labels themselves, and offline they do. Keeping one theory alive across a month of exhibits is the part that needs the archaeologist. The code keeps the catalog, so nothing gets forgotten.

Hall V

How it’s built

Printed parts

Pedestals with a frame on the front. The sticker label goes into the frame.
Posts for the rope barrier, with a cotton cord between them.
The counter: a desk with four pictures for the clues, the big hold-to-talk button, buttons A, B and C and a holder for the USB microphone. The ESP32 sits inside.
The MMU3 prints the counter pictures in color, and everything is PLA or PETG.

Electronics

ESP32 in the counter reads the buttons and tells the Mac while the big one is held.
USB microphone. It records only while the button is held.
Thermal printer with BPA-free self-adhesive paper.
Mac as the Gateway: one script with whisper.cpp, Claude with safeguards and the collection catalog, and a parent page for the phone.

Parts list

Part	What it does	Share of the cost
Thermal printer	Prints the labels	Largest item
USB microphone	Hears the description on the counter	Second largest
BPA-free sticker paper	Label stock, refills over time	Third
Filament (PLA, PETG)	Counter, pedestals, posts	Fourth
ESP32 and buttons	Talk button, A, B, C	Rest of the total
Cotton cord	The rope barrier	Rest of the total
Mac (Gateway)	Runs the script	Already at home
Claude	The archaeologist	A few CZK a month
Total		1,300–2,000 CZK (about €50–80)

The estimate exists only as a total, so the table ranks the parts by how much of it they take.

Architecture

Where code ends and the model begins

Code does

Records only while the button is held and deletes the recording once whisper.cpp has the text.
Keeps the catalog: exhibit numbers, chosen labels, the current theory.
Sends Claude the description and the catalog as text.
Checks the answer: exactly three labels, each short enough for the sticker, nothing from the blocked word list.
Waits for A, B or C and for the parent’s confirmation, then prints.
Without a network, switches to blank forms.

The model does

Plays the archaeologist from the year 3026 in a serious museum voice.
Writes three labels that are wrong in different ways.
Reads the catalog and ties each new label into one theory about Living Room III.
Rewrites the theory when the new exhibit points somewhere else.

Hall VI

Safety and offline

The voice stays homewhisper.cpp transcribes on the Mac and the recording is deleted right after. Claude only ever gets text.
Push to talkThe microphone records only while the button is held. The counter never listens on its own.
Code holds the rulesClaude writes the label text. Code checks it against length and a word list, and a parent confirms before anything prints.
Nothing to swallowPedestals, posts and the counter are large printed parts. Nothing on the counter runs on coin cells, and the label paper is BPA-free. Exhibits come from the house, so the house rule applies: nothing small enough to swallow goes on a pedestal within the 6-year-old’s reach.
Parent accountClaude runs on Dad’s account with safeguards for kids, which Anthropic’s terms allow for products used by minors. The kids never type into it. Mom or Dad reads the labels from the phone.
OfflineWithout a network, the kids write labels on pre-printed forms. The audio guide, once built, plays only commentary that is already saved.

Hall VII

Roadmap

A weekend
First playable prototype

Mom or Dad types the child’s description into Claude on the phone and reads out three labels. The chosen one goes onto a card in marker, and the child adds the exhibit number. The counter, microphone, printer and collection memory wait for later. A cardboard box makes the pedestal, and the cord stays.
Next
Full version

The printed counter with ESP32 buttons and the USB microphone, the Mac script with whisper.cpp, Claude, the catalog and the parent page, the thermal printer, printed pedestals and posts.
1,300–2,000 CZK (about €50–80)
Later, optional
Audio guide

A printed handset shaped like a museum audio guide, with an ESP32-S3, an NFC reader, an INMP441 microphone, an amplifier with a speaker and a rechargeable battery. NFC tags go into the pedestals. Claude writes a one-minute commentary for each exhibit, the Czech Piper voice reads it, and the Mac saves it as a file. Grandma and Grandpa get the guide on a lanyard and hold it to the exhibits. A curator can also describe a new exhibit straight into the guide while holding its button.

Paper numbers and the phone are enough to try it first: Claude’s commentary is read aloud on the phone and saved under the exhibit number.
1,000–1,600 CZK (about €40–65). The ESP32-S3 with modules and battery costs the most; NFC tags and filament stay under 200 CZK (about €10). Claude comes to about 1 CZK per exhibit.

Annex

More ideas to try

A planted theoryAt the start of the week the kids secretly draw a card with a theory, say that the inhabitants of Living Room III worshipped the vacuum cleaner, and describe their exhibits to nudge the archaeologist toward it without ever saying what a thing is for. The archaeologist tags the weekly theory with one theme from the same list the cards come from, code compares the two, and on a match the thermal printer prints a commemorative plaque for the discovery of the century. At the next visit, guests can guess from the labels which theory the curators were pushing.
Thumbs up, thumbs downWith the audio guide, the curator hears each new commentary first. Thumbs up saves it to the exhibit, thumbs down asks the archaeologist for another one.
A question at the end of the tourWhen the tour is over, the audio guide asks one question about the exhibition, and the curators announce who paid the most attention.

Status: an idea. Nothing on this page has been built or tested yet, and the demo is a simulation with pre-written answers. Prices are estimates from Czech shops in October 2026.