Augmenting Museum Experiences with Mixed Reality

Current Mixed Reality experiences focus primarily on training, design and entertainment. This paper presents a very different application, scientific virtualization and its use in informal education. Specifically, we describe a case study that extends an existing museum dinosaur exhibit to include an encounter with ancient sea life. The real world assets and environment are augmented and, in some cases, occluded by the virtual entities that inhabited the seas at the time of the dinosaurs. Achieving this blending of the real and virtual motivated the development of novel real-time computer graphics algorithms and distributed simulation protocols, as well as new conventions in the creation and production of nonlinear MR experiences.