Mundo minero

Museo de los Niños — Theme park

Mundo Minero

Technology direction for an interactive five-activity visitor experience at the Museo de los Niños in Bogotá.

This interactive, immersive experience was commissioned by the Museo de los Niños, a renowned theme park in Bogotá. It consists of five interconnected activities in a physically immersive space where visitors experience the many dimensions of mining, revealing its risks and the reasons for worldwide demand. It also highlights the contrast between the sociocultural problems and the industrial and economic benefits it generates in Colombia.

A project produced with the company Omotio of which I was a founding partner and director of research and technology. 

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The first activity is a video projection on a 1.5-square-metre map of Colombia. Children navigate the map from four interactive workstations, each with a joystick and two buttons. As they explore, dynamic information appears on a 70-inch screen so they can learn where different minerals are found in the country. The second activity features a virtual miner emerging from his cave on a holographic screen. Here, children learn about the safety equipment needed to enter an underground mine. In the third activity, they enter an underground mine cave, where they use industrial tools to extract emerald, gold or coal rocks.

 

Then, in the fourth activity, the children come out and reach an open-pit mine. They watch this type of mine being created as a video projection opens up the ground with 3D animations. Finally, in the fifth activity, they arrive at a scientific laboratory to analyse all the minerals collected on the journey. When they place the rocks in the analyser, a huge screen shows what type of mineral each one is and how it is used.

In the fourth activity, the children reach an open-pit mine. This space consists of an environment with 360-degree printed images on the walls and ceiling, and a 3D floor projection whose perspective is aligned with the visitors’ position to one side, making it appear as though they are watching a miniature version of this type of mining operation.

 
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Before leaving, visitors reach a room containing a huge computer that reveals the mineral composition of each object placed in its scanner. They can inspect the properties of the minerals they collected, and also scan everyday objects provided on a shelf, to raise awareness of our daily mineral consumption.

We also created a travelling, dismantlable dome that could offer part of the experience in different locations around the country.

For this immersive experience, we had to design all the architecture, decoration and furniture that housed it. Multiple hardware and software developments were required to control the entire visitor journey. We wrote an overarching script linking each activity to the previous one, and created animations, graphics, illustrations, soundscapes and recordings to achieve the intended experience.

Production team:

  • Sebastian Gonzalez Dixon: General direction, UX design, software development, video production (partner)
    Carlos Adrian Serna: Technology direction, UX design, hardware and software development (partner)
    Anderson Arebalo: Industrial design, UX design
    Jose Urbina: Graphic design
    Fabian Jimenez: Production
    Andres Caro: Administration
    Luz Mary Bernal: General assistant.