LEVIATHAN BRINGS ART TO SCIENCE & INDUSTRY
Published in Reel Chicago, December 2014
After ten months of research, development, testing and installation, Chicago conceptual design firm Leviathan unveiled nearly a dozen interactive attractions designed to help make the Museum of Science and Industry’s “Numbers in Nature” exhibit become a multigenerational playground of entertainment and education over the next decade.
Transforming intricate mathematical concepts into digital images that respond to the gestures and movements of whoever stands before them, Leviathan’s innovation literally allows museumgoers to grasp motherlodes of scientific high falutency with a glance around a room or a flick of a wrist.
“Patterns appear throughout nature,” says Leviathan EP Chad Hutson. “The spiral of a nautilus shell, the shape of the cosmos, the branches of a tree. That’s what the exhibit was designed to convey. Our role was creating the interactive and media content.”
The fruits of Leviathan’s labor are shapes and colors that explain the science behind the beauty of heaven and earth. The sketch of Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man, which illustrate the artist’s notion of perfect human proportions, is superimposed in real time over the reflection of a person’s arms and legs. The spirals of the Fibinacci sequence, which define the curves found in pine cones and nautulus shells, are formed by tracing the movement of a viewer’s fingertips onto a digital tabletop monitor.
Like the diversity in the size of Leviathan’s installations — which range from an ultra wide screen theater that plays a customized montage near the entrance of the exhibit to a number of workstations that capture the movement of hands inside it — the company used a variety of tools to make everything come to life.
The Microsoft Kinect tracks viewers’ arms, legs and torsos to render the proportional comparisons in the Vitruvian Man installation. The Leap controller zooms in on the movements of the hands to create the shapes of the Fibinnaci installation.
At the center of all this high-tech mumbo jumbo are a bunch of dials and knobs that provide museumgoers with an easy way to manipulate the sensations. The simple, analog controls were part of Leviathan’s plan from the get-go.
“We had to design this to accomodate an eight year old through an eighty year old,” Hutson explains. “It needs to be intuitive the minute you walk up to it.”
To help realize that intuition, Leviathan created a brief for themselves before responding to the museum’s “two, very lengthy” requests for proposals. The homework not only helped them win the business but also allowed them to propose a singular solution.
“We expressed sincere interest in doing both film and interactive,” Hutson explains.
“The content needed to help tell the story of these different scientific principals. If the interactive did not match that style, tell the same story, we felt it would have had less impact.”
So began a nearly yearlong effort that “required a lot of moving parts,” involved “many vendors” and stretched from Leviathan’s west side studio to the museum’s south loop campus.
The final result, which is scheduled to run for ten to fifteen years, successfully achieved its goal to provide science and fun before it was even installed.
“This entire project made us three times smarter than we were before,” says Hutson.