INDE’s Dinosaurs Travel Asia in a Groundbreaking Augmented Reality Exhibit
Published: October 29, 2015
T-Rex Revealed, a travelling exhibition themed around National Geographic Channel’s blockbuster documentary Dino Autopsy, drew 150.000 people on the opening day in Shanghai on Oct 1, and will continue to wow huge crowds across Asia when it visits Shenyang, Jinan and other places.
This is a dinosaur exhibition with a difference, a total experience that visitors will not get anywhere else: there is no skin, there is no bone, there are no skeletons, it uses solely Augmented Reality (AR) technology developed by INDE. With this amazing new concept the audience gets immersed into the world of dinosaurs in a very unique and memorable way like never before.
T-Rex Revealed - Dino Exhibit in Augmented Reality by INDE (with interviews)
The event combines INDE’s brand new MobileAR dino experience for smartphones and tablets - both Android and iOS - with Back to the Jurassic, an Appshaker BroadcastAR installation for large screens. BroadcastAR allows a group of people to interact with true scale dinosaurs, see themselves live on a huge LED wall and even have their snapshots with dinos taken. The MobileAR experience, curated in collaboration with the University of Hong Kong, shares scientific information on these fantastic creatures, including interesting corrections based on recent research.
A major finding recently revealed by scientists is that T-Rexes were most likely covered in feathers, so one of the animations shows what the animal is now believed to have looked like. Another animation compares the size of a dino’s skull to a human skull, a third one showcases that T-Rexes were not invincible, they were both prey and predator.
INDE has developed photorealistic content with vibrant animations that make the viewer easily forget about all the surroundings and travel hundreds of millions of years back in time, while gaining great amount of knowledge about these wonderful giants that once walked the Earth.
The MobileAR application at the exhibit is image-based, i.e. actual information about T-Rexes is used to trigger the content, however, it can also track objects to bring the animation to life. With these individual experiences people can take their time to learn and explore, using either on-site tablets or a mobile device of their own.
The 3D animation is triggered by pointing the device at the printed image, using a mobile application developed by INDE
Alex Poulson, INDE’s CEO said: “Augmented Reality in both mobile and large screen version represents an incredibly valuable tool: it is a new way to educate people about history, about the natural world, about everything they ever dreamt of experiencing but never could. It is about recreating situations and environments that train, educate, inform and entertain by experiencing them first-hand.”
INDE’s Director of Sales, Leo Ferri added: “What we were hoping to achieve, and we have successfully done so with this application, is to entertain visitors but at the same time educate them so they get to know a bit more about T-Rexes and have fun doing so. Anyone can partake in this experience, it’s for adults and children, adults become children as the content is very captivating and it definitely stops people in their tracks”.
INDE's Appshaker BroadcastAR experience - visitors of the exhibit interacting with INDE's dinosaurs on a large screen
Back to the Jurassic, INDE’s Appshaker BroadcastAR experience for large screens is already available for rental or permanent installation around the world, and the MobileAR dinosaurs from T-Rex Revealed will also be available for licensing in the coming months, helping host venues - education, entertainment and retail spaces - become really popular destinations.
Since 2011 INDE has built award-winning AR systems worldwide for clients such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Enterprises, Beijing Aquarium, Universal Studios, BBC, 20th Century Fox and Coca-Cola.