We are excited to share our installation at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science’s latest permanent exhibit, Hall of Ancient Life. As the most recently installed piece of the museum’s Walk Through Time, the exhibit encourages visitors to explore evolution before the dinosaurs, with a focus on the natural history of what is now the state of New Mexico. Among the collection are never-before-seen fossils of ancient creatures, including the oldest known fossil in New Mexico, and two brand new digital interactives from Ideum; Exploring Earth and Postcards from the Paleozoic.
The Exploring Earth interactive provides visitors with a fun, hands-on way of learning about the changes in the Earth from ancient times up to the modern day. A 3D rotatable globe model, featuring scientifically accurate data, animations, and textures from Dr. Ronald Blakey of Deep Time Maps, shows the position of each land mass at the selected point in history. Six modern cities can be tracked across the moving continents: Albuquerque, Washington DC, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Nairobi, and Beijing. Beneath the globe is a timeline, spanning 600 million years up to the current day. When users scroll through it, the continents on the globe shift from our modern formations back to ancient land masses. Along the timeline are hotspots that when selected, detail significant geological events in the history of the Earth. The timeline and map invites visitors to visualize what life was like when each exhibit fossil was a living organism.
The interactive features two separate modes of exploration, with each mode highlighting different events and information. The first mode, Free Explore, shows the entire 600 million year timeline with hotspots of global geological events. Each hotspot indicates a significant change to the planet, and when pausing on one, it triggers global underlaid animations relevant to the chosen time. Text on the right of the globe provides information about geological events such as earthquakes and asteroid impacts, and highlights the dominant fauna and flora of the time.
The Explore NM mode brings visitors closer to home, and focuses the subject matter to events within the state of New Mexico, encouraging users to picture their home state as a dense tropical forest with ocean views and strange plants and animals. The hotspots on this timeline are more narrow, spanning ancient life in New Mexico during the Paleozoic era only. Each event takes place between 505 million and 265 million years ago. When selecting a hotspot, users will see an illustrated state map with the land masses of that time period, with Albuquerque labeled. Additionally, a photo gallery shares modern photos of New Mexican land formations and fossils that dated to the chosen time period.
Exploring Earth is installed on a wall-mounted Ideum 55” Presenter touchscreen display with a rear-mounted computer and a custom silver finish. The Presenter features a 4K UHD display and top-of-the-line touch technology from 3M/TES.
Ideum’s second interactive for the Ancient Life exhibit is Postcards from the Paleozoic. This experience invites visitors to create personalized digital postcards which can be downloaded directly to their phone via QR code for personal use and sharing.
Each postcard option is based on a different Paleozoic environment, each of which are based on sites around New Mexico. Users can choose from Ancient Oceans, Captain Sponge Reef, Kinney Lagoon, Southern Beaches, or Permian Extinction. The postcard can be customized by adding a photo of themselves or their family, selecting plant and animal stickers, and by applying visual filters. If they choose to add a photo, they are prompted to step back and look up at the camera installed above the screen, and are given an acting cue, such as “Look out for the ancient sharks! Act surprised!”. After a countdown timer, they will then have four photos to choose from. The selected photo will be silhouetted and applied to the postcard, where they can pinch and zoom to resize it against the background. They can select plants and animals that are unique to their chosen environment, and when selected, can learn about each species. Finally, they can select a filter to apply to the entire image, edit anything they’d like to change, and generate a finished postcard. The final postcard contains information on the back just like a real card, and the users can download the image to their phone via a QR code.
Postcards from the Paleozoic is built with vertically mounted Ideum 55” Inline touchscreen displays, each housed inside custom wood and acrylic cabinets. The cabinets are painted jewel-toned colors that are reflective of the tropical beaches and jungles of Paleozoic New Mexico. Behind each Inline display, mounted inside the cabinet, is a custom-built computer that hosts the software exhibit; above the display is an enclosed Orbecc Femto Bolt Camera. Each of these are securely enclosed, but can be accessed by museum staff and technicians from the side should there be any need for maintenance.
These exhibits for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science present natural history from a familiar perspective. The focus on local specimens and their relationship to the greater natural world provides additional context, encouraging museum patrons to imagine themselves living in a radically different world than the one they are used to. Exploring Earth and Postcards from the Paleozoic provide an engaging educational element to the fossils within the Hall of Ancient Life, encouraging visitors to take a digital piece of the exhibit home, and bringing ancient creatures back to life.
