A dinosaur skeleton comes to life through a mobile phone screen, while a robot responds to a visitor’s movements in a staged theatre environment. This project combines mixed reality technology, immersive theatre, and museum collections to create new ways for audiences to learn about dinosaurs and robots. The problem it addresses is that museums often struggle to engage visitors with complex scientific themes—static displays and text-heavy explanations can fail to capture attention, especially for younger audiences. If successful, the project could transform how cultural heritage organisations present science, making it interactive and emotionally resonant rather than passive. It tests three settings: ticketed immersive experiences for groups of around ten people, five-minute interactive exhibits in shopping centres in partnership with the Science Museum and Natural History Museum, and augmented reality mobile apps for children aged 8–12. Researchers at the University of Exeter will measure audience impacts using eye tracking and biometrics to identify what makes these experiences work. The findings could help shape future museum design, retail partnerships, and home-based learning tools across the cultural and leisure sectors.
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The project will explore how immersive technologies can be used to engage audiences of all ages with dinosaurs and robots in new ways and create a range of valuable learning and entertainment experiences. The project will have a number of deliverables targeted at a number of discrete target audiences in three different arenas. - Visitor Experiences: The project will combine mixed reality technology and immersive theatre with new academic audience analysis to provide a brand new type of immersive visitor experience. In these ticketed experiences, groups of c10 will enter a staged environment to interact with actors and technology in a fun immersive world. This magical entertainment will open up global revenue streams through tickets, licensing and merchandising. We will test business models and act as a pathfinder project for future initiatives across the cultural sector and spillover sectors of leisure and exhibitions. This unprecedented multi-disciplinary creative process involves directors and writers from the award-winning Almeida Theatre working with experts from computer generated imagery and visual effects, computer game development, immersive technologies, museum curatorial teams, TV documentary research, 3D audio and multi-sensory technologies. - Retail destinations: the project will explore how cultural organisations and shopping centres can work together to attract new audiences and bring new types of museum experiences to life. In partnership with the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and shopping centre group Intu we will run 5 minute interactive experiences that communicate science ideas based loosely on the Museum collections. We will explore how these experiences help overcome the long-held understanding and engagement challenges facing museums whose collections address complex themes and ideas, helping shape the cultural heritage sector for the 21st century. Our target audience for these first two arenas is adults and children aged 14 and above. - In-home “edutainment” for children. Through mobile phone apps designed for use at home and using augmented reality technologies to drive immersion, we will work with the museums to create interactive learning based dinosaurs and robots games for children aged 8-12 years old. University of Exeter researchers will measure the impacts of immersion on audiences and analyse the creative process to provide valuable learnings for the design of future experiences. Research will include use of highly novel data retrieval methods relating to eye tracking and biometrics; identification of psychological antecedents for positive visitor experiences using mixed reality and objective physiological indicators; and identification of physiological markers to improve experience design, and personalisation.
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