First Life is the brand new attraction to the National History Museum created by Atlantic Productions in collaboration with Samsung Gear VR.
It’s a completely unique exhibition that deep dives you into the ‘First Life’ on planet Earth found within the ancient oceans. David Attenborough’s voice guides you into the evolution of various sea creatures spanning a timeline of over 540 million years!
Initially you are seated in a small auditorium and handed a Samsung Gear headset along with a Galaxy S6 smartphone. The Samsung Gear is a virtual reality device developed in collaboration with Oculus. This impressive VR headset has a 96˚ field of view that truly immerses you into the environment allowing the screen to go beyond your peripheral vision. It even has a focus wheel for those people with glasses, allowing them to wear the headset freely without compromising the experience.
To start there is a video on a cinema screen in which David Attenborough introduces you to the exhibition, with tips on how to get the most out of your experience and encouraging you to look around the virtual environment in 360˚ throughout.
The footage you view on the headset is created completely by 3D computer graphics. Atlantic Productions worked closely with Dr Greg Edgecombe, the museum paleontologist, in accurately modelling and animating these creatures to truly bring them to life. It was fascinating and unique in the way the production company manages to tell a story in a 360˚ environment and draw your eye to the action. As sea creatures swim past you can’t help but turn your head to follow the action only to find a huge creature lurking behind you! Being immersed in bubbles or far too up close and personal with dangerous predators makes the exhibition exhilarating and educational.
The exhibition has been a huge sucess and as a result the National History Museum has decided to extend the exhibition until 6th September 2015, so if you fancy diving into a truly cutting edge VR meuseum experince you can book tickets on their website.
With growing interest and popularity companies are finding new and innovative ways to use VR to create unique experiences, tell stories and truly draw you into a world that takes you to another reality. It’s easy to see that VR is here to stay.
At FX we have an internal R&D team developing some truly ground-breaking VR experiences, to find out more sign up to our newsletter below today.
