Category: The Yorkshire Museum

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Sir David Attenborough Fed A VR Dinosaur At Yorkshire Museum Exhibition

A new virtual reality (VR) exhibition at Yorkshire Museum in the UK has opened allowing visitors to feed dinosaurs. As part of the unveiling broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough attended the exhibition.

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The ‘Jurassic World’ exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum invited visitors to travel back through 150 million years of Yorkshire history to discover lost giants and the changing worlds they inhabited. Taking visitors from the depths of the deepest part of the ocean to the ancient coasts and tropical shallows, visitors will be able to meet dinosaurs and sea monster that once roamed the landscape. Thanks to the latest technology and research, the exhibition aims to bring visitors closer then ever before to the history of the dinosaurs including a chance to feed one.

Created by Immotions Manchester Studio, the educational VR content takes a user back to the late Cretaceous Period where they will be up close with a fully scaled Argentinosaurus. Here, using a HTC Vive, they will be able to reach out and feed the stunning creature as it goes about its life only a few feet from the user. As part of the unveiling event for the exhibition Sir David Attenborough attended and was even able to feed said dinosaur himself, experiencing the immersive wounder that is VR.

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Martin Higginson, Executive Chairman of Immotion Group, said: “We are delighted to work with The Yorkshire Museum and put our immersive VR experience at the centre of this new and exciting Jurassic World exhibition. We were also very happy to see Sir David Attenborough, who is nothing short of a national treasure, open the exhibition. We hope that this unique and interactive display inspires a new generation of palaeontologists and natural historians.”

This is not the first time Sir David Attenborough has been embracing the latest in VR technology as he in involved in a VR experience titled Hold The World where users can get one-on-one time with him and explore a number of rare fossils.

The ‘Jurassic World’ exhibition is now open at the Yorkshire Museum and is a long term exhibition and will be open for at least the next two years.

For more stories like this in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

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Experience Viking Life in VR

The popular perception of Vikings is of hulking blonde warriors ravaging the English coast and taking their booty back to Scandinavia. Recent research, however, suggests that Vikings didn’t just come with warriors, but with craftsmen and traders, and in much larger numbers than previously thought. A virtual reality (VR) exhibition is aiming to show visitors what life was like for this Viking army.

The Yorkshire Museum is working in partnership with the British Museum and drawing on research done at University of Sheffield and York University to present a VR recreation of a Viking camp located at Torksey in Lincolnshire. Wearing VR headsets, visitors to the museum can pay a visit to AD 872-3 and see what life was like for Vikings in the winter camp as they waited for spring thaw.

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Speaking to the Guardian, Professor Julian Richards said that this was the first project to use VR to depict the Viking world: “Torksey was much more than just a handful of hardy warriors,” he said. “This was a huge base … From the finds we know, for example, that they were repairing their boats here and melting down looted gold and silver to make ingots or bars of metal they used to trade. Metal detectorists have also found more than 300 lead game-pieces, suggesting the Vikings were spending a lot of time playing games waiting for spring and the start of their next offensive.”

 

The VR scenes are based on objects that have been found by archaeologists at the site, such as jewellery, clothes and even hundreds of lead gaming pieces. The game pieces form part of a ‘Games Night’ VR scene where a group of Vikings can be seen playing a Norse strategy game called hnefatafl.

The exhibition is titled Viking: Rediscover the Legend and will open at the Yorkshire Museum on Friday 19th May 2017.

VRFocus will bring you further news on immersive museum experiences when it becomes available.