Whoa! A saber-toothed cat just sniffed my couch. Yikes, it’s b-b-big! And it roared. Virtually, that is. Scientists have just brought a herd of Ice Age animals back to life — in the virtual world, anyway. You can interact with these creatures safely. Just call them up on a smartphone.
These meet-ups are brought to you through a technology known as augmented reality, or AR. It can superimpose virtual images onto what you see in your environment — be it a classroom, bedroom or soccer field. Or they can come from virtual reality, or VR. Experiencing this is more like entering a 3-D movie, where you are part of the action.
Museums across the United States have been turning to AR and VR in hopes that it will allow people to experience the ancient world in a new and more meaningful way.
Matt Davis works at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, Calif. He and Emily Lindsey, at the museum’s La Brea Tar Pits, wondered if VR and AR might help people learn science concepts better than just reading about them or viewing fossils. They planned to test it using a virtual-reality exhibit on Ice Age animals.
But to do that, the two paleontologists would need scientifically accurate, digital renderings of those now-extinct animals. And they quickly found that there weren’t any. That set them on a new path — to model those prehistoric creatures themselves.Bringing the past back to life
Without a time machine, we’ll never know exactly what Ice Age animals looked like. Artists often try to show us. But if their images aren’t scientifically accurate, they can misrepresent the ancient world. For instance, many people think velociraptors were large, leathery, dangerous predators. That is, after all, how the 2015 movie Jurassic World portrayed them. In fact, these dinos were actually the size of turkeys and covered in feathers.
Explainer: Understanding ice ages
To make their images realistic, the Los Angeles team turned to science. “We used our knowledge of bones, the fossil record and scientific literature to make the most accurate AR models we could,” explains Lindsey. They worked with a company called Polyperfect to make the models. This company creates animated characters for video games. The paleontologists shared detailed instructions on how the animals should look and move. Artists from Polyperfect drew the shape of the model, then animated it. The Los Angeles team reviewed the process along the way.
They also documented the decisions they used to create these new models. For example, they knew from fossils the size of saber-toothed cats. They had to guess, however, on the sound of their roar. Along the way, the team noted which decisions were based on established science and which were based on some educated guess.Explains Davis, “Anytime people create paleoart, we want them to share the scientific decisions — the research and the artistic decisions they made.” Right now, he says, “Those decisions aren’t usually communicated.”
Mauricio Anton is an independent paleoartist who works with the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain. He, too, has shared this decision-making process when creating paleoart. Many of those details show up in his scientific papers, books, talks at conferences and on his website. But sharing that process may not always be practical, he adds. It’s time-consuming to write scientific papers, and artists are only paid to deliver a finished product. Unless it is part of their paid work, he suspects, artists may not want to spend the time detailing their methods as the Los Angeles team did.
Yet, Davis argues, “the artistic part is just as important as all the other research.” In fact, he adds, “It’s an important part of how we communicate our findings to the public and other scientists.” In this case, he argues, “Art is a part of [the] science.”
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