Gallery
Walk-throughs
Life-size 3D places you can walk around, from a field of dinosaurs to the inside of a cell.
These exhibits are places rather than objects. Each one is a life-size 3D space that you move through on foot: use the arrow keys or WASD on a computer, or the on-screen stick on a phone, and walk up to anything that catches your eye.
Things in the space are built to their real size, so you can stand next to them and judge it for yourself. Each walk-through has the same long article underneath as the other exhibits, with the measurements and the sources behind them.
Exhibits
Dinosaur size comparison to humans: 172 life-size animals
A 600 m park of 172 prehistoric animals at their real size, from the first dinosaurs to T. rex, laid out by age.
Swim to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a 3D ocean
By 20 m down, almost all the red in sunlight has gone, and the Challenger Deep is another 10,900 m below that.
Walk inside a cell: animal, plant and bacterium
Grown a million times, a mitochondrion is about the size of a sofa, a whole E. coli is 2 m long, and the kinesin towing a vesicle past you walks at 0.8 metres per second.
Walk the Apollo landing sites
Standing on the Moon with your eyes 1.6 m up, the horizon is only about 2.4 km away. All six Apollo landing sites are here, from Tranquility Base to Taurus-Littrow.
Coral bleaching causes: why warmer water turns reefs white
Corals get most of their food from algae living in their tissue, and when the sea stays more than 1 °C above its usual summer high for weeks, they lose those algae and turn white.
Walk around a Mars base
On Mars an eye 1.6 m up sees the horizon 3.3 km away. Walk ten areas of a concept base and stand beside every lander and rover that has worked there, at full size.
Solar system scale model measurements along a park walk
Shrink the Sun to a ball 1.39 m wide and Earth becomes a 1.27 cm marble 150 m down the path, Neptune is 4.5 km away and Voyager 1 would be 25.7 km.
Walk among ice age animals
A 600 m park of 65 animals from the last ice age at their real size, from woolly mammoths to sabre-toothed cats, on a time slider that runs 50,000 years.
Human evolution walk
Lucy stood about 1.1 m tall. Walk 7 million years of human relatives at their real size, with yourself beside them.
Fly with life-size pterosaurs
Quetzalcoatlus spanned about 10 m, close to the 11 m wing of a Cessna 172, and standing it was as tall as a giraffe. Watch it pass over a Cretaceous cliff, then fly with 35 pterosaurs from three ages.
Giants of the sea: megalodon and the blue whale
Swim beside 48 sea giants at their real size, from a 28 m blue whale to megalodon, Livyatan and Mosasaurus, in eight seas from today back to the Triassic.
Northern lights over an Arctic village
The green of the northern lights comes from oxygen about 100 km up, and in the biggest storms the red glow above it can be seen as far south as Korea.
Walk through Pompeii on its last day
A walkable model of Pompeii with a clock from the first column of Vesuvius to the surge of the next morning, then to the ruins of today.
Shrink to the size of an ant and walk into its nest
At 5 mm tall, a blade of lawn grass is 20 times your height and a black garden ant walks past at chest height.
Fly over Jupiter's clouds and the Great Red Spot
In the late 1800s the Great Red Spot was about three Earths long; Hubble now measures it at about one. Float over it with Earth beside you, then sink 132 km into the clouds with the Galileo probe.
Walk through the Colosseum
Under the sand of the Colosseum, 28 freight elevators were raised by eight people each, 6 m below the arena.
Walk through the Sagrada Família
Inside the Sagrada Família the columns branch like trees 45 m up, and the sun moves blue and orange light across the floor.
Walk down the Grand Canyon rock layers
Walk 1,360 m down the Bright Angel Trail through 13 rock layers, from a 270-million-year-old sea floor on the rim to 1.75-billion-year-old schist by the river.
Walk through Gyeongbokgung Palace
In the courtyard of the throne hall, 24 stones told each official where to stand, from the first grade by the hall to the ninth by the gate.
Walk through Machu Picchu
Most of the work that holds Machu Picchu on its ridge, 60 per cent by one estimate, lies under the ground in foundations and drains nobody sees.
Giant sequoia forest: walk under the largest trees
Stand at the foot of the General Sherman Tree, 83.8 m tall and about 2,200 years old, then climb its trunk and see how hard the water up there is pulled.
Walk through the Terracotta Army
Pit 1 of the Terracotta Army is 230 m long and holds an estimated 6,000 figures and horses, and every one of them was painted once.