Dippy Augmented Reality Experience

The Client

Natural History Museum / National Museum Wales

The Brief

To bring Dippy, the Natural History Museum’s iconic Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton to life with augmented reality during her stay at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff.

Having already created the Museum ExplorAR augmented reality experience for the museum, we were asked to extend the experience to bring Dippy to life, allowing visitors to see her ‘in the flesh’ and get a real sense of how she may have swished her tail to deter predators and just how high her neck could reach.
Before Dippy arrived in Cardiff, we scanned the skeleton to ensure the model we created was to scale, and also so that, when visitors hold the device up to the skeleton, the model will trigger accurately.
Our 3D artists worked closely with the palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum and National Museum Wales to establish how Dippy would most likely have looked, based on their current understanding of skin colour, pattern and textures, muscle groups, teeth, spines etc. Once the model was complete, it was then rigged, animated and programmed to appear in AR along with virtual billboards to give visitors more information about how she may have lived.
This is the first time that visitors have been able to see the Dippy to scale, as she may have looked and behaved. Already an iconic and impressive skeleton, in augmented reality she is even more impressive. Initial responses to the experience have been fantastic.