Marble Speedway

Marble Speedway at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York is a Permanent Exhibit that we built with a fabrication partner.

This was an incredible project to work on; it is a large-scale "marble" run for custom designed billiard balls that travel about 350' of track.

The incredibly complex project took more than a year to complete with at least one full time staff member working from November, 2024 to December 2025. FBU's Marble Speedway team grew to 5 active team-members during the busiest parts of the project.

Some of the features of the project include:

• Industrial-grade device Edge Computing Network
• 36+ interconnected components
• 24 In-track interactive components
• 6 Arcade style kiosks
• Custom Machine Learning ball identification system
• Live, track level video streaming
• A system of Display Signage and Tracking Applications
• 26x4' Custom Display
• Advanced audio system
• Custom 2 path helical lift
• Custom ball elevator
• 2 custom industrial conveyor elevators

Prior to our involvement, The Strong had already created a thorough vision of what the project could be. Fire Burns Up worked closely with the teams to lead the project with an eye to the interactive experience design.

Fire Burns Up contributed many, many pieces of this project including:

• Creative Ideation/ Brainstorming
• Project Management
• Experience Design/ Advocacy
• UX Architecture
• Mechanical/ CAD Design
• System Architecture
• Software Development
• Hardware Development
• Electrical System Design
• Network System Design
• AI Training and POC
• Documentation/ Drawing Author
• Prototyping, Fabrication, and Installation Lead
• Technical Lead

Fire Burns Up served as the lead creative technology and interactive experience design partner on the project. We helped The Strong take their already mature vision and turn it into a complete, playable attraction. We didn't just contribute to architecting a complex system, but we also came up with a vocabulary for shaping how the exhibit feels to race, how guests understand and interpret what's happening, how the technology amplifies the sense of play and excitement, and how the entire exhibit performs on the macro-scale.

Marble Speedway was an experience design challenge. By shaping the rules and conventions for the pacing, spectacle, clarity and responsiveness of the attraction through the interactive portions of the experience, we established the foundational framework that The Strong can continue to evolve, tune, and expand over time in response to observed play patterns.

In designing the UX and digital Application and Audio portions of the experience, we were able to add intentional points of drama, build anticipation, orient players within the experience, and deliver emotional payoffs.

Fire Burns Up led mechanical design, software, electronics, networking, media systems and machine-learning sensing. We directed innovation across those layers so each technical decision could serve the guest experience and not just engineering.