BU Research Blog

Funding is tough in higher education and many great ideas fall short of just a little bit of money to makes something cool a reality. This could be one of them. 

PalaeoGo is a concluding HEIF project that puts extinct animals into your smart phone using Augmented Reality.  The idea was to enhance visitor experience at museums and science outreach in general.  We have generic Apps in the app stores (App Store, Google Play) as well as a couple of bespoke ones specific to museums, The Etches Collection (App Store, Google Play) and Winchester Science Centre (App Store, Google Play) as well as a BU Campus version (App Store, Google Play). They bring dinosaurs to life and are hugely popular with children. 

Perhaps the work we are most of proud of is that with Kingsleigh Primary School. In December 2019 we ran an outreach event which saw us take our PalaeoGo apps into school and we ran a dinosaur colouring competition alongside. This saw Year Two children compete for the prize of having their drawing come to life in a video. The community response was huge, and the school were happy with the outcome.   

So, impressed with the idea and aware that once the project was over, and we had lost our talented digital artist Cameron Kerr (something which has now happened), such interventions would no longer be possible we began to plan a solution.  We put our minds to trying to create the pipeline which would take a scanned piece of artwork from a child and produce their own video as the end product. In this way a school where ever they are in the World could run their own dino colouring competition. We now have that code all primed and ready as illustrated in this video, and we are looking for a talented web developer to package it all into a neat school/child friendly website, preferably pro bono.

So, ideas and/or offers of help are needed on how we move this brilliant idea into something that kids across the World can interact with.  Answers on a postcode to the frustrated PalaeoGo team.