Imagine yourself walking through the late Cretaceous period, encountering prehistoric plant and animal life, dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and you’ve entered the educational landscape of the future.
Pittsburgh-based Mechanimal was founded by Jason Bannister, a one-man technical wizard who is creating highly scientific virtual models for museums and local robotic companies using the tools of 3-D game design. One of their first big projects was the Ovirap Tour, an interactive dinosaur experience using 5 projectors in the Earth Theatre of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, part of “Dinosaurs in their Time,” a world renowned new hall with pose-able scale models that Bannister helped to design.
“We’re soon going to be projecting animals on a wall at full-scale, running them in real-time, so the dinosaurs will be looking at you as you learn about them,” says Bannister, CEO and chief artist and scientist. “This is the age of research, helping museums to take things to the next level with usable 3-D models as scientific tools. It's awesome.”
Mechanimal, located in the River Walk Corporate Center, was founded in 2007 and plans to triple in size in the next year with the addition of 2 more technical artists. Bannister has big plans for the company, from creating painstaking models of specimens where every bone is in its place to constructing large scale digital libraries.
In addition to museum and contract work, there’s other projects like helping forensic scientists to solve crimes or Lunokhod, recreating a virtual version of the robotic rover that the Russians landed on the moon in 1970.
“I’ve searched the world and there’s no better city to do what I do than Pittsburgh,” says Bannister. “Pittsburgh has the dinosaurs, the gaming community and the robots. It’s the place.”
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Jason Bannister, Mechanimal