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The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
The New Dinosphere® Exhibit

Education | Museum

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (TCM) opened their original Dinosphere® exhibit in 2004. It quickly became their most popular permanent exhibit. In February of 2022, TCM opened the New Dinosphere® Now You’re in Their World exhibit, an even more amazing collection of giant fossilized creatures featuring new ancient beasts, immersive aquatic worlds, an art lab, and a real working paleontology lab. To enhance the new visitor exhibit, Balance Studios designed and developed four cool new media-driven experiences for that allow young visitors to interact with dinosaurs from the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Mesozoic eras.

Project image — left
Project image — right
Continents Animations

Continents Animations

Looping Video Projection

Working from storyboards created by TCM, Balance Studios created four animated clips of the Earth demonstrating how the continents of our world looked very different during the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Mesozoic periods.

Running four seconds each, the animations illustrate how our continents look today, then they move and morph to reflect the positions of the continents during the three specified eras during prehistoric times.  The detailed animations help visitors visualize the changes our planet has experienced over millions of years.

Help This Sauropod Grow!

Help This Sauropod Grow!

Touch Screen Application

This touch screen activity helps visitors see how sauropods reached such enormous size and highlights their eating habits and predators.  A brief tutorial shows visitors how to grow their sauropod’s size (eat lots of food!) and avoid dangerous predators.  After being introduced to a newly hatched baby sauropod, visitors explore a Jurassic Forest, finding appropriate food for their sauropod, and hiding from or attacking predators.Players who fill an energy meter showing food consumption before a countdown clock runs out can see their sauropod grow to adult size (up to 65 feet long!). After completing their activity, players learn more about the amazing amount of food sauropods needed to eat to grow to their full size.

Build a New Sea Creature!

Build a New Sea Creature!

Touch Screen Application

This interactive touch screen activity allows visitors to explore how sea creatures of the Mesozoic era adapted to survive in different aquatic environments. Based upon fossils of the Mesozoic era, the activity allows visitors to create new sea creatures consisting of the heads, bodies, and fins from different prehistoric creatures (including Elasmosaurus, Baptanodon and Ptychodus), then launch them into the Mesozoic seas.  As their sea creatures navigate different habitats (a reef environment during daytime, open water during daytime and open water during nighttime) they learn how well adapted their creations find food and evade predators. Careful, or your sea creature might get swallowed up by a Mosasaur!

Factors including water temperature, visibility, food sources and predators impact the success of the sea creatures that visitors create in the activity. In each simulation, the sea creatures created by visitors either survive the challenge or are eaten by predators. In each scenario, the visitor receives information on how the specific adaptations helped or harmed them in the habitat they chose.

Diplodocid Digestion Animation

Diplodocid Digestion Animation

Touch Screen Application

Working from storyboards created by TCM, Balance Studios created a 20 second animation of the digestive track of a sauropod. The animation shows the internal organs of the giant creature eating, digesting, and excreting food.  Visitors watch as the Sauropod chomps on leaves, then changes to an X-ray vision view that shows the food moving through the digestive tract and excreted out of the body.  What could be more compelling than dinosaur poop? 

The Idea

Create interactive experiences that help bring dinosaurs to life.  Allow visitors to have fun by controlling the activities of an animated sauropod and other prehistoric creatures to learn how their physiology, diet, environment, and predators impacted how they lived and died during the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Mesozoic periods. 

Services

Our team worked in collaboration with Museum team to develop robust, entertaining activities that helped visitors learn more about dinosaurs through entertaining animations and experiences that have the look and feel of interactive games.  We worked hard to make accurate scientific information easily accessible to a young audience by making each experience fun, easy to use, and educational. 

The Result

Kids loves dinosaurs, and so do we!  The experiences we created for the new Dinosphere® exhibit let young visitors uncover fascinating details about these ancient giants, and learn about their physiology, environment, food sources and predators through hands-on interactive activities.  Our work for the new Dinosphere® provides excitement for visitors on a personal scale just like the giant Sauropod, Elasmosaurus, and Baptanodon fossils in the exhibit engage young visitors on a LARGE scale. 

Ready to Bring Your Ideas to Life?

We'd love to hear about your project and explore how immersive technology can bring your vision to life.

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