Copyright Photo: Senckenberg-Museum/Hapto

The Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz allows visitors to experience inaccessible living spaces in a way that would not have been possible before. Virtually shrunk to the size of an insect, visitors penetrate the forest floor and learn about the organisms living in it from a completely new perspective.

Through interactions with virtual organisms and the immersive and emotional experience of the habitat soil, completely new approaches to scientific content are created in the museum. The testing of innovative digital mediation formats with the aim of bringing research in natural history museums up-to-date closer to a broad audience is one of the aims of the nationwide project “museum4punkt0 – Digital Strategies for the Museum of the Future”.

The VR application was created with Unity3D. The 3D objects (environment and organisms) and animations were created in Cinema4D.  In order to achieve a re-use of the models in future projects, they will be published after the end of the project, to the extent possible.

Source: http://www.senckenberg.de/root/index.php?page_id=18881&preview=true