A "Jurassic World" exhibition recently opened here in Shanghai. I went to see it, and OH MY GOODNESS IT WAS INCREDIBLE. Wow. Like, amazing. It was so awesome.
It's robot dinosaurs. So of course I loved it, because I am a dinosaur nerd and I work in robotics. It was AMAZING, oh my goodness it was AMAZING.
(Oh this is great, I just did some googling and found that Smart Shanghai reviewed the "Jurassic World" exhibition. I love the tone of their article, totally agree.)
My photos:
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| Sign in the parting lot. 侏罗纪世界 (Jurassic World) |
So, the way it works is it's a bunch of different rooms, and you spend a few minutes in one room, and then they guide your group along to the next room, so the whole thing takes a fixed amount of time (I think it was maybe 40 minutes to go through the entire thing.)
As you walk into the first room, the music from "Jurassic Park" is playing, and there's this big long-necked dinosaur standing right there behind the arch- wow, it was an amazing experience, walking into that.
This dinosaur moved its head and neck.
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| I love how there's a little cable from the dinosaur's neck to the ceiling. I guess in case it breaks, at least it won't totally fall down. |
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| I think this is a styracosaurus, with its baby |
It was so much more amazing in real life than what the photos can show. These dinosaurs, they all move and make sounds, and the environment of each room is really set up to make it a whole experience.
At several points throughout the exhibition, there were these "trainers" holding baby dinosaurs. This is not just a simple puppet- it's a robot that moves its head, opens its mouth, etc.
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| Incubator with sleeping baby dinosaurs |
In the picture above, these baby dinosaurs are robots which breathe and move their heads.
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| Dinosaur poop |
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| Bugs trapped in amber |
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| Fossil skull |
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| Blue, the velociraptor |
One of the rooms had a sort of performance with a trainer and a velociraptor. The room was very dark, probably to make it harder to see that this was a person wearing black pants, in a dinosaur costume. Loved it.
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| Ankylosaurus |
The ankylosaurus- the photos really do not do it justice. This thing was incredible. Just standing there in the middle of this huge room, making dinosaur sounds and swinging its tail. AMAZING.
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| The jeep from the first Jurassic Park movie. |
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| Tyrannosaurus rex |
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| Indominus rex (left) and tyrannosaurus rex (right) |
Indominus rex is a fictional dinosaur from the "Jurassic World" movie.
The very last room in the exhibition features an I. Rex and T. Rex roaring at each other, and WOW it was amazing and terrifying. I wasn't close enough to see too many details about how the I. Rex robot moved, but the T. Rex really walked. Like, initially it was off in the corner, and it walked all the way out to roar at the I. Rex.
There was a big fence blocking our view of where the T. Rex's feet would be, so I suspect it was really on some kind of wheels. But we could see the legs, and the legs were really moving in a way that looked realistic, and its body moved from side to side with each step, as if it was really putting its weight on its feet. I suspect it was on wheels down there somewhere, but wow the walking was so incredibly realistic.
I was glad there was no storyline about "oh no the dinosaurs are escaping" or anything like that. It was just "here is our well-run dinosaur park."
Wow, did I mention it was amazing?
I found a video on youtube- definitely watch the video, because it shows the dinosaurs moving. Like I said, my photos can't really capture how amazing these robots were.
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