Last night a number of us from Ideum went to the opening of Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico at the New Mexico Museum of  Natural History and Science.  We helped develop two computer-based interactive exhibits for this exhibition.

The Fossil Viewer touch screen allows visitors to pan and zoom an image of large fossil block discovered at Ghost Ranch here in New Mexico.  There’s more about this interactive in the Ideum portfolio (see Triassic Fossil Viewer).

The other interactive exhibit is a small database collection of information about Coelophysis, the official State Fossil of New Mexico. We haven’t added this to our portfolio yet, but you can see the Web version of this kiosk at nmstatefossil.org. The floor version is a bit different in design and functionality. This Web-based exhibit was developed using Ruby on Rails.

The Coelophysis database exhibit uses the iCab browser, which has an excellent kiosk-mode. Both of the interactives we developed with the Natural History Museum run using Mac mini computers. Along with their low cost and small footprint, we found them powerful enough to run a 24″ monitor at a 1920 x 1200 resolution (for the Fossil Viewer).

Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico opens tomorrow, May 17th and will be a permanent part of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science.

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