Real life commendation for virtual dinosaur exhibition

An exhibition Deakin researchers helped create, which brought to virtual life a dinosaur that lived in the Otway Ranges, has been highly commended at the 2018 Victorian Museum Awards.

Deakin School of Engineering’s Dr Kaja Antlej and Associate Professor Ben Horan and their team developed The Little L Project exhibition with colleagues from Geelong’s National Wool Museum and Swinburne University’s PrimeSci. The exhibition created a 'mixed reality' museum experience, blending the physical and digital worlds for the first time.

The exhibition showcased Victoria’s state dinosaur ‘Leaellynasaura amicagraphica,’ a wallaby- sized herbivore who called the Otway Ranges home around 106 million years ago.

‘We’ve pushed the boundaries to not only allow people to interact with 'Little L' in virtual reality, but to be able to simultaneously touch a 3D printed Leaellynasaura,’ Associate Professor Horan, Director of Deakin’s CADET Virtual Reality Laboratory, said at the time of the exhibition in the National Wool Museum.

The Victorian Museum Awards ‘celebrate the wonderful achievements of the museum and gallery sector’. The commendation for Little L came in the category of Medium Museums (8-50 Paid Staff).

‘We are honoured that Museums Australia (Victoria) has highly commended the Little L Project,’ Dr Antlej said.

‘This recognition demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary research and creative use of technology in museum and heritage applications. Projects like this can lead towards solutions which help local communities to learn about their environment and heritage in more engaging ways.’