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As one of the top five natural history museums in the world, Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands welcomes nearly half a million visitors a year.
Its mission is to record all life on earth, while providing a combined educational experience of seeing and doing for an audience of all ages. It won European Museum of the Year 2021, and with around 42 million specimens, it is home to one of the world’s largest natural history collections.
After moving to a new, bespoke building, Naturalis needed to improve its livestream capabilities to complement the custom-built network infrastructure. The equipment in the previous museum was too old-fashioned and rigid. Furthermore, the global pandemic forced the institution to close. To ensure they could still share world-class research with an audience at home, they needed to upgrade their hardware. The in-house production team wanted an easy-to-use 4K UHD solution that could offer the professional quality it deserved.
Canon provided Naturalis with a full end-to-end digital imaging solution with the use of HDBaseT projectors, including WUX5800Z and WUX6600Z. For a museum with multiple galleries, the immersive use of projectors is invaluable for seeing the bigger picture of nature at large.
“What a lot of museums do is show still pictures of dinosaurs. But what’s more interesting is to see the way they move, which gives a whole new dimension. When you see a T-rex skeleton and then you see a projection of the dinosaur move, you can compare the bone structure, the muscle formation and see how the entire anatomy functions. The projections bind it all together in the imagination,” says Ashwin.
Inside the museum’s gallery titled ‘Death’ lies another impressive application. “The ‘circle projection’ is an immersive 360 experience, where we use five projectors stacked at a very short range to cover the entire cylinder. How sharp and diagonal you can point them without losing picture quality is amazing,” comments Ashwin. “It’s a one-of-a-kind solution, only possible with the Canon projectors.”