living world

"The Living World" at the Saint Louis Zoo is a unique natural history museum utilizing both living animals and advanced media technologies. With 2.5 million people visiting annually and learning about the animal kingdom, global ecology, and man's impacts.
 

→ Read the PRINT Casebooks 9 Best in Exhibition Design award.

Relying heavily on both living exhibits and cutting-edge technology, the St. Louis, Missouri, facility houses over 100 animal species and hundreds of software, interactive, and video-based exhibits. The facility was designed at HOK Architects with Chip Reay as Director of Design for the project and Phillip Reay as the lead industrial designer & tech developer. Phillip, now at Metacosm, developed and produced exhibit concepts, media content, interactive software, and technical designs for the exhibit fixtures in this world-class institution.

A few of the exhibits

Exhibits Hypertext

Remember 1988? When this was developed there was NO world wide web, but there was the idea of hypertext, and the first color macintoshes came with hypercard. This early hypertext uses a touchscreen interface to present a friendly full-color image of the nearby exhibits. By touching the exhibit picture, a full text description of the exhibit appears. Here, any word can be touched to cross reference a full biology text book with over 60Mb of text and images; enough to answer almost any question. (Exhibit is shown in the video above)

A Live 3D Microscope

This video installation created a giant projected 3D microscope. A Zeiss stereo microscope fitted with two camera eyepieces feeds video to two projectors, each with polarized filters. These project a six-foot wide stereo image above the microspcope. Viewers wear cross polarized glasses to see the 3D image. This worked very well, allowing even large school groups to share the view of living microscopic creatures such as Volvox and Amoebae.

Tour of a Bee

The world's first movie made in an electron microscope. Concept & Voice by Chip Reay, Microscopy by David Scharf, with original music "A fugue in B" using original Honey Sounds by Bernie Krause.
→ watch on youtube

The Bat Game

Put your ears between the speakers, close your eyes, grab the joystick, and chase the moth using only stereo sound. People next in line watch you try to keep the crosshairs centered on the moth, but players can only listen.

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