Designing scientifically-grounded paleoart for augmented reality at La Brea Tar Pits

Matt Davis, Benjamin D. Nye, Gale M. Sinatra, William Swartout, Molly Sjӧberg, Molly Porter, David Nelson, Alana A.U. Kennedy, Imogen Herrick, Danaan Deneve Weeks, Emily Lindsey

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Paleoart is an important medium that communicates scientific understanding about prehistoric life to both the public and researchers. However, despite its broad influence, the scientific and aesthetic decisions that go into paleoart are rarely described in formal academic literature or subjected to peer review. This is unfortunate, as paleoart can easily create and perpetuate misconceptions that are carried through generations of iterative popular media. As an example of what we hope will become a standard article type in paleontological journals, we describe the process and latest scientific research used to develop 13 new paleoart reconstructions of Ice Age animals found in the La Brea Tar Pits, including the saber-toothed cat, dire wolf, and teratorn. We adopted a stylized low polygon aesthetic for these three-dimensional (3D), ani-mated virtual models both to support learning objectives and to optimize performance for smartphone based augmented reality (AR) experiences. We encourage all researchers to follow the example of this article by publishing paleoart descriptions for any major new work that, at a minimum, reference the aesthetic and scientific reason-ing behind general posture and proportions, gross appearance of soft tissues, color-ation, and behavior.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number25.1.a9
JournalPalaeontologia Electronica
Volume25
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • 3D
  • augmented reality
  • La Brea Tar Pits
  • museums
  • paleoart
  • Pleistocene

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Palaeontology

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