Natural History Museum – Interactive Film

For the Darwin 2 extension of the London Natural History Museum we collaborated with BBC R&D and Shadow Industries to produce a ground breaking Augmented Reality exhibit. The exhibit is featured as part of the interactive film at the David Attenborough Studio.

Members of the audience use handheld devices mounted with webcams to see natural history models that are overlaid in the cinema environment. The illusion is given that hominids, dinosaurs and tetrapods move around the space and amongst the audience. This is achieved by positioning AR markers around all the surfaces of the cinema making the experience fully immersive.

The first phase of the project was to produce a prototype that integrated an AR system suitable for a cinema scale space with a games rendering engine. We then made this application interoperable with the Flash movie that accompanies the film. Finally we worked with Shadow Industries to integrate the natural history models and animations.

Darwin Centre →

Images © 2011 Natural History Museum

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