Undory Palaeontological Museum

About the project

The task

The museum tells how the Earth has changed and why, millions of years ago, there was a sea where Ulyanovsk now stands. This had to be shown clearly — continental drift over 600 million years, the geology around Undory and the Undoria Geopark, the anatomy of marine reptiles — and children had to be able to play with the material themselves. The first stage ran until 22 December 2025; the second, including on-site setup, until the opening in May 2026.

What we did

The “World map” LED sphere

On the sphere, the continents drift apart and come together — from the Ediacaran, 635 million years ago, to the present day. Next to it is a touch stand: the visitor chooses one of 17 periods and epochs, from the Ediacaran period to the Holocene, or moves a slider along the timeline, and the sphere shows what the Earth looked like in the chosen era. For each era the screen gives its age and duration, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, average temperature, a short story and two creatures of the time: the mammoth and the giant deer for the Pleistocene, the nothosaur and the mixosaur for the Triassic. The “Where am I” button shows where Undory was in that era.

Interactive projection relief

A 2 × 2 metre wall-mounted model of the terrain around Ulyanovsk onto which a map is projected. The visitor switches between topographic and geological maps and turns on layers: the boundaries of the Undoria Geopark, the boundaries of the Ulyanovsk Palaeontological Reserve, labelled geological cross-sections and the geological time scale. The buttons “Middle Jurassic”, “Upper Jurassic”, “Lower Cretaceous”, “Upper Cretaceous”, “Palaeocene”, “Neogene” and “Permian” highlight on the map only the deposits of the selected time, and its segment on the scale. We made the software, the animated graphics and the 3D terrain model used to manufacture the physical model.

Guide's tablet

An augmented reality application: when the tablet is pointed at the pliosaur skeleton, muscles build up over the bones on the screen, then skin, and the reptile starts to move. Facts about pliosaur anatomy appear along the way. We made the application, the 3D model of the pliosaur and its animation.

“Living drawings”

A projection wall with a control tablet. A child colours in the outline of a marine reptile and places the sheet on the scanner — and their drawing swims in the ancient sea on the wall; the animals can be touched. In the “Build a dinosaur” game, the visitor chooses the body, head, front and rear flippers and tail — “Your dinosaur comes to life!” — and the assembled reptile swims off into the shared sea. In the “Find the fossil” game you have to guess where a skeleton is buried, dig it up — a trilobite, an ichthyosaur, a mammoth, a sabre-toothed tiger — and choose on the scale the era in which the animal lived: the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic or Cenozoic.

Interactive sandbox

The visitor digs a hole in the sand, the camera detects the hollow, and the projector shows a fossil found in that spot with a description: what it is, how old it is and why it matters to science.

“Interactive models + screen”

For this installation on Mesozoic fauna we did only the design: the concept, sketches, graphics and 2D animation for the screen, where the selected animal appears as a large model and facts about it are presented.

How it is built

The software was written for this museum; we completed on-site setup by 12 May 2026.

The sphere is controlled from the touch stand; it displays an animated unwrapped map of the Earth's surface at 2048 × 1024 pixels — from today's continents to ancient ones and back.

Relief: the 3D terrain model was prepared both for printing the physical model and for the software scene; the projector image is fitted to the relief by calibration.

“Living drawings”: a projector, touch sensors, a camera and a scanner; the reptiles' body parts are drawn separately and animated, so any combination can be assembled from them.

Sandbox: a camera above the sand tracks the relief, and the projector casts the image directly onto the sand.

Result