Natural World

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Creative Lead

Natural World is a concept in order to update the natural habitat dioramas into living breathing exhibitions and experiences at a high impact but low cost solution using augmented reality technology. The idea would be that using shape sensing capabilities Ar sets would be able to align an animation to the uniform square frame of the glass. the high contrast of light vs the darkened hallway would further strengthen this solution. In addition guests, after being shown a short clip or story of that animal in its environment, would be able to learn more about it such as where it inhabits, where it used to inhabit, its diet, and how endangered it is. They can even play videos with audio of the animal in the wild. To do this guests can simply reach out and touch their preferences, technology very similar to the microsoft kinect would be able to track such movements.

In this way these often outdated and frequently passed by parts of the museum could serve as a new source of education and entertainment for all museum goers.

How does it work?

Similar to any AR experience, by putting on the visual tech guests will enter into an augmented reality where digital images and object are overlaid onto the environment. Using the common AR technology widely used in products like Vuframe or GoogleobjectsAR, a device can detect a face or frame that a digital object can orient itself to. For example shown here, the mammoth has appeared using the book surface as a base for it to project from. The image can only be seen through the AR lense. All objects need a frame or shape to orient to. In our exhibition “Natural World” this will be achieved not by physical shapes but by light. The light contrast on site in the galleries is significantly darker in the guests area than in the displays. These diorama light boxes will allow guests’s animals to easily orient themselves onto the real world thus breaking the physical relationship between us and the scene.

Once in the gallery guests will be able to walk up to a chosen display and the animation will come to life for them! guests can revisit a display more than once and they don’t have to do it as a group. The hope of this exhibit is to give these outdated and forgotten diorama displays popular in the late 19th century a new beginning. As it says in the gallery, “the purpose of these dioramas is to provide a window to rarely seen moments in the natural world so that we as humans can better understand our relationship with it.”