At the Natural History Museum in London,
the finishing touches are being made to an exhibition which explores life that exists
in near-total darkness.
The Museum is working with a specialist design studio to use video gaming technology
to bring visitors closer to some of the most inaccessible environments on the planet.
Life in the Dark is about how animals that live in dark habitats are adapted to be able
to survive in them.
We take the visitor on a journey through a nocturnal habitat,
into deep caves and down into the deep sea.
In the deep sea there's lots of light and this light is made by animals.
And that's the focus of the last room in the exhibition and we wanted this to be the showstopper.
So we had this idea of creating a room filled with bioluminescence
so the visitor could almost be immersed in this environment.
The exhibition team needed to create an installation
which was beautiful but also accurately reflected life below the waves.
They sought the help of Museum scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying
the deep sea.
Well, when you get down to about 1,000m in most parts of the ocean it's totally dark.
The temperature, I think, is around 4°C
and also life is very slow - metabolic rate is slow - so you find the animals can't move
very fast.
So you find most communication down there is actually by bioluminescence.
Gill Mapstone is a deep-sea researcher who for the past 20 years has been studying siphonophores,
which are a little-understood group of deep-sea animals.
Gill was one of several scientists who helped the exhibition team understand life in the
deep ocean.
So the Portuguese man o' war is one siphonophore that you may have heard of,
because they float on the surface with a big float and have a lot of tentacles,
and they're also toxic.
But most other siphonophores are completely different.
They have a stem which is usually quite long,
but the whole animal can vary from a couple of centimeters to 40m or so
and they only live below the surface.
Most species of deep-sea siphonophores are visible in the darkness
thanks to bioluminescent cells which occur on their stinging tentacles.
Armed with this knowledge, the Museum engaged Jason Bruges Studio in east London
to transform the science of the siphonophore into an immersive experience for visitors.
The scientific accuracy was our main focus while developing the content.
So we tried to convey scientific concepts and scientifically accurate behaviours
in our creative, expressive way,
but without introducing elements you would never see in nature.
So how do you present such complex behaviour and relationships, but in a creative way?
The solution lay in software normally used in video gaming.
We made use of a game engine, a software platform that people use to create video games.
Using the video game engine we could define each animal behavior
and we could choreograph them over time.
But the designers took their innovation a step further.
They used virtual reality to evaluate their designs without having to physically build
and rebuild the exhibit.
Virtual reality is an incredible medium
that allows us to test designs and almost transport ourselves to the future.
It sort of blends creative coders like me, hardware engineers and production people
and designers
onto the same platform because we can all input into the same digital object,
which is the VR experience.
Once the design was complete
it was time for the production team to translate the virtual into the physical.
The team individually attached over a thousand LEDs onto hundreds of strands
to be suspended from the gallery's ceiling.
As each strand is attached, the exhibit slowly begins to take shape.
Until finally the exhibition is ready to be revealed to the public.
What will be most magical for the public
is being immersed in a space where you see all those tiny dots of light
having a life of their own.
It's been a really innovative and exciting project to work on,
and it'll hopefully be giving the visitor
something really new and exciting to experience when they come to visit.
Hi everyone, we hope you're all super excited for the Life in the Dark exhibition.
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