Fly Like A Pterosaur

In this highly engaging interactive experience we called “Fly Like A Pterosaur”, or simply “F.L.A.P.”, visitors use their body movements to pilot a virtual pterosaur. Players flap their arms to maintain speed or they’ll stall and plummet. A bend at the waist makes their reptile avatar bank for bugs and dive for fish! Developed for the AMNH exhibition, Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs.

👤 Role: Software & Hardware Engineer, Tech Lead, Concepting, UX Design, User Testing

📰 Press: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Polygon, Mashable, AAM

👥 Credit: AMNH Exhibitions Department

Process Highlights

Our goal was to create a playful, open-ended experience at the heart of the Pterosaurs exhibition. What better way than to let visitors take flight? And with the Microsoft Kinect, we could make the experience frictionless and magical while powering the underlying mechanics with scientific data.

Prototyping

To test how a Kinect-based flight simulator would function in an unpredictable environment, I set up a prototype for our office holiday party. This Unity project linked a person’s posture and to the orientation of a 3D model in flight, Santa’s sleigh. Users piloted Santa through a blizzard trying to find the hidden 3D model of the museum. The chaos of the party made it a great test. Attendees were able to jump in and interact with the game easily without instruction, confirming that this was a solid core mechanic and a fun user experience. The crowd made it difficult for the system to choose a pilot, exposing an issue we’d solve with floor graphics and guard rails.

User Studies

User testing helped ensure that each of our 500,000+ visitors would enjoy a comfortable flight. We assembled a diverse pool of test users to make sure our sensors and system would work well for visitors of all skin tones, all abilities, and all ages.

The Science Of Flight

While fun was our focus at this point in the exhibition, we were also committed to accuracy. Pteranodon’s broad wingspan allowed visitors to soar with relative ease. Bat-sized Jeholopterus, however, needed more frequent wingbeats to stay aloft. We worked closely with experts in paleontology, morphology, and biomechanics in to construct our creatures’ animations. We calibrated our flight simulation based on white paper values of lift and drag coefficients found by scientists who modeled pterosaur wings and stuck them into wind tunnels.

“The aerodynamic and anatomical differences between the two pterosaurs - which might appear abstract on the page - emerge immediately during play. The smaller Jeholopterus proves much harder to control. Its small wings require you to flap constantly like a bat, which makes it maneuverable but erratic. The Pteranodon, by contrast, glides and plunges like an albatross.” — The Escapist

Luck In The Archives

A stroke of luck in this project came while researching the museum’s prior exhibitions. In 2005, almost a decade before our exhibition, a team of museum preparators constructed a beautiful diorama of Jurassic Liaoning for the exhibition Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries. They meticulously researched flora and fauna, sculpted realistic models, and most importantly, photographed each on a white background. A wealth of scientifically vetted source material for our environments right there in the archives of AMNH. We were able to key out the solid backgrounds and use these archival photographs in tools like Unity3D’s tree creator to generate rich, scientifically accurate settings through which our pterosaurs would fly!

Virtual Reality R&D

After the “launch” of Pterosaurs, the fun continued behind the scenes. The Oculus Rift DK2 had just come out, and virtual reality experiences could be built in Unity. I spent some time adapting this project into an VR prototype that put users in the body of a pterosaur that they controlled with their own movements via Kinect. The third-person mode is depicted here, but first-person was the best experience. To see wings where your arms should be was pretty mind-blowing in 2014!

And since Unity is multi-platform, I tested an iOS version, too. Less ground-breaking than VR at the time, but it worked well. Why not?