#18ThingsVRMightBe: Living Room Jurassic Park

Or Cretaceous Park, Triassic Park, Permian Park…

This post is part of a series
Eighteen Things Virtual Reality Might Be:
A Weekly Exploration of Wild VR Applications.

Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs! DINOSAURS! These ancient creatures inspire awe. To find out what dinosaurs looked like, you might look it up online to get an illustration. You might look over in your old DVD (or even VHS) collection and watch your copy of Jurassic Park. But, all of these are missing an important feeling of depth. How far away is that t-rex? How big does a large predator feel when it is running right at you?

To get some feeling of depth, you could see the newest installment, Jurassic World, with 3D glasses. Even with 3D glasses, you’re missing other perceptual depth cues. When you move your head around, the scene on the screen stays in the same perspective. You can’t move around the dinosaur as you’d like. You’re stuck to the director’s choice.

“Ok, maybe a natural history museum,” you think.

Not me, but that is the dinosaur that would scare me. Look, it even mostly-killed that triceratops. From Parenting for Peanuts

Great choice! When I was a kid, I used to go to the St. Louis Science Center, look up at the fake t-rex, and get terrified. More recently, I’ve stood in awe of the huge skeletal recreations at my local Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh. Especially after seeing Jurassic Park, you get a real feeling for their size. But something is still missing.

A Possible Solution: VR Dinosaurs at Natural History Museums & at Home

If our representation dinosaur isn’t realistic enough, make one that is.

When Oculus was unveiling the consumer version of their virtual reality headset, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe described how much more visceral a dinosaur would be in virtual reality. And, the other night I was at an Oculus Tech Talk and the presenter showed a video he took of a VR user cowering in the corner after a t-rex approached her. I think we have confirmation that the immersive experience gives you a much more realistic feel of what dinosaurs would have been like.

Crytek, the developers of the realistic graphics engine Cryengine, made a VR demo. It’s sick.

Look mom! It’s a dinosa… OMG IT SAW ME. WHERE DO I RUN?

What’s the meaning beyond making you cower in your living room? I think the answer is natural history museums. These are places that already have life-size models of animals (many of which are likely taxidermy). It would be a huge value add to allow visitors a look at animals and dinosaurs in their natural habitats. Allow visitors to get closer to the animals and get an even better understanding of size. Kids would eat it up and adults would feel a sense of adventure too.

In an upcoming post by Chris Givan in States of Being, he outlines why limiting information in a museum is akin to calling museum visitors dumb. I’d continue that argument to say we need more immersive experiences. When I was younger, I had a harder time getting excited about history class. Sure some of the stories are neat, but I had to imagine the scenarios myself. Or, we’d watch some outdated video that bored me to sleep. What if instead we let kids explore ancient ruins and long-dead beasts by themselves? What if they were allowed to step onto the battlefields? What if they could be there when the US Constitution was written? Visceral and emotionally intense experiences lead to increased memory recall.

With that, I leave you with Jeff Goldblum and a wedding party running away from a dinosaur.

From Adam Biesenthal Photography.

See you next week.