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Revivre, expérience en réalité augmentée
Digital creation
Work

5 min

Revivre, an augmented reality experience

The Muséum d’Histoire naturelle tour has been a big hit with the public, using augmented reality to rediscover extinct species. This experience is presented on IFdigital, the website of French digital creation

© MHNM Studio
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A true technological challenge

Inaugurated in 2021, Revivre is the fruit of an unprecedented collaboration between the teams at the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle and Saola studio, which specialises in augmented reality. Visitors will be able to take a fifteen-minute tour of several species whose extinction was caused by man. As these now mythical creatures - the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the elephant bird - appear life-sized before us, a narrator explains their characteristics and the reasons for their disappearance. It's an opportunity to raise public awareness of the anthropogenic pressure that still weighs on many species today. 

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An artistic and scientific challenge

Often little known to scientists, through mere stories, drawings or bones, the animals brought back to life for a brief moment in the Museum's galleries presented a major technological and artistic challenge. How do you recreate and animate these creatures in a credible way? Some of them are impressive in size, like Steller's sea cow, a majestic marine mammal nearly eight metres long, decimated in just a few decades by intensive fishing? So we had to find a balance between the pleasure of wonder and scientific rigour, in order to offer visitors an experience in tune with the requirements of a natural history museum. 

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Reconstructing what has been lost

Unlike virtual reality, which isolates the user in a virtual world, augmented reality is a technology that uses special glasses to bring holograms to life. The majestic American sabre-toothed tiger, extinct for almost ten thousand years, and the endearing Quaggas, small zebras decimated by hunting in Africa in the 19th century, are among the collections in the Grande Galerie de l'évolution. Bruno David, director of the Muséum, explained at the inauguration that "only technology can enable us to reconstitute what has been lost", a bittersweet observation that sounds like an appeal to preserve what can still be preserved. 

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Rethinking species conservation

Today, there are more than 30,000 species threatened with extinction, as listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The experience offered by the Muséum naturel has a clear educational dimension, and aims to raise public awareness, particularly among the very youngest visitors. Experiments such as Revivre, which have proved very popular with audiences, also offer a glimpse of hope. A species of Angolan beetle, which forms part of the exhibit and was thought to be extinct, was recently spotted for the first time in several decades.