{"id":1618,"date":"2019-07-10T06:44:06","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T06:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mnemonic.studio\/memo\/?p=1618"},"modified":"2019-07-10T16:50:37","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T16:50:37","slug":"t-rex-the-ultimate-predator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mnemonic.studio\/memo\/t-rex-the-ultimate-predator\/","title":{"rendered":"T. rex: The Ultimate Predator"},"content":{"rendered":"

AMNH’s latest exhibition uses big media to complement its big subject….<\/h4>\n

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More than any of my local NYC museums, I find myself returning to the American Museum of Natural History<\/a> on a regular basis due to the quality – and frequency – of their temporary exhibitions. Many of these are intended to travel to other institutions; all are designed with an ambition and narrative flow that I don’t often see in science center exhibitions. <\/p>\n

The scope of that ambition often includes digital media, and I’ve been impressed with the inventiveness of AMNH’s in-house team in building digital interactivity around natural history topics. And so I set off to see the institution’s latest offering: T. rex: The Ultimate Predator<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>On first entering the exhibition space, visitors come face-to-face with a full-scale model of a T. rex<\/em> hatchling. It casts the ominous shadow of a fully-grown dinosaur on the wall behind it, and from time to time this shadow springs to life through animation; it’s a subtle effect, which plays out more theatrically later on in the exhibition.<\/p>\n

Rounding a corner, we encounter some relatively traditional exhibitry; models of other dinosaurs in the Tyrannosaur family sit on a sleek black counter. The counter holds backlit graphic panels; the occasional interactive or smaller artifact livens up the content, but all in all, the exhibition remains heavy on reading.<\/p>\n

A little later, the room opens up quite a bit to reveal a more free-form structure, with a full-sized adult T. rex<\/em> skeleton sitting in the middle of the space, surrounded by a variety of models, fossils, and digital interactives.<\/p>\n

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I first headed over to a Virtual Reality station, where I waited behind six other visitors for what ended up being a full half-hour. Two staffers assisted visitors in putting on and removing VR gear (a third station went unused, perhaps due to technical issues). The virtual experience began in a minimalist facsimile of a dinosaur hall at AMNH, where my task was to assemble a skeleton – I used the hand controller to grab fossil fragments from a pile and put them in place, forming the T. rex<\/em>‘s skull, teeth, and jaw. It was a pretty simple exercise – the bones snapped into place once I released them – but it did make me think about the dinosaur’s skull in a way I hadn’t before considered. <\/p>\n