Mall life: VR experience allows Chinook shoppers to experience the first flickers of life on Earth

Calgary Herald

4 days ago

During the new, immersive, virtual-reality experience Life Chronicles at Chinook Centre, visitors will eventually come across a nest of hatching Dakotaraptor eggs.
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It's a nice 'miracle-of-life' type of moment until the mother of the new hatchlings catches on and lunges at us with Jurassic Park levels of intensity, leading to one of many hasty exits via time travel with the help of a know-it-all robot from the future named Darwin. Yes, the spectacle is definitely educational. But, at that point, it's more like being thrown into The Lost World.
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'It's like being in a sci-fi movie,' promises Fabien Barati, CEO of the Paris-based company Excurio that created Life Chronicles.
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It is the latest VR 'immersive expedition' to open at Chinook and will run simultaneously with Horizon of Khufu in the 10,000-foot space that once housed Nordstrom. Khufu, which was also created by Excurio, has attracted 65,000 people since opening in December. It is an ambitious spectacle that takes visitors on a time-travelling trip through Cairo and ancient Europe while telling the story of Egyptian monarch Khufu.
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But Life Chronicles is arguably even bigger in scope, taking visitors from the first flickers of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago right up to present-day Tanzania and into a future city in 2223.
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There are definite sci-fi elements beyond the frequent time travel. The adventure begins when our excitable biologist/guide, Charlie and Darwin accidentally activate a time probe while attending a conference on the evolution of life. This whisks participants back 3.5 billion years and through various stages of evolution. Charlie and Dawrin must locate different probes in the time period to keep the robot's batteries charged so he can help bring us back to 2223. Before the journey, visitors are shown the formation of the Earth in the solar system before travelling to the Cambrian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods as well as the modern African Savanna. Fitted with VR headsets, we follow Charlie and Darwin. At some points, visitors are miniaturized to observe early forms of life, such as marine worms and hitch a ride on the back of a trilobite. We dodge massive flying reptiles, scary-looking marine reptiles and witness a showdown between some lumbering triceratops and tyrannosaurus before encountering giant herbivores such as Edmontosaurus and Alamosaurus and eventually the Hobbit-like Flores humans.
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As with Khufu, which bases its narrative on real history, Life Chronicles is as educational as it is spectacular. While walking on cliff ledges, precariously climbing massive trees filled with snakes and other creatures and dodging dinosaurs and the spear-wielding but undeniably endearing Flores humans, Charlie excitedly pontificates with dizzying scientific detail about each period.
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Before coming to Calgary, Life Chronicles was in Paris, London, Montreal, China and Australia. Roughly 160 people were working on it for two years before it was released, helping bring 150 species to life. It is a co-production between Excurio and the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in France, which had 30 scientists lend their expertise to the project.
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'They helped us recreate all those species: the plants, the animals, through different periods,' says Barati. 'It was not so easy because for all these species we only know them through fossils. No one has seen them in real life. They helped us see how they look, the colours, the textures and how they moved because, once again, nobody saw them move. We are going underwater, going into the sky and in lots of different landscapes. So it's a bit crazy. It's an adventure.'