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The DaVinci Institute has set its sights on creating a museum of future inventions designed around our pursuit of inventions that will create a spot in the history books for people who develop them. The museum will be composed of multiple pavilions, each with its own scientific concentration, sponsored by businesses from around the world.
In 2002 the Institute launched a project to uncover many of these future inventions. Since its inception, the project has attracted a significant following, attracting over 500 submissions from 22 different countries around the world. While the original goal was to publish a book listing of the best of these submissions, the project team concluded a book wasn’t enough. We expected to receive some very good ideas, but were overwhelmed by the caliber of ideas submitted.
With plans for the development of the museum now in place, the Institute has been in contact with many of the world’s best artists, designers, and model makers to begin crafting individual exhibits that are both interactive and mind stimulating. People attending the museum will listen to pre-programmed narratives for each of the exhibits describing the ideas and path of development necessary to get there. Additional elements will be added to the museum over time including 3-D models, holographic displays, videos, and much more.
The Museum Experience
Designed as a full-day experience for young and old alike, a day spent absorbing the future path of humanity through the lens of the inventions and technology that will take us there, will both inspire the mind and challenge the spirit. A series of theaters will be incorporated into the design to give demonstrations and allow people to talk with the experts and expand the body of thought.
The Grand Entrance - Visitors entering the museum will experience a dramatic shift in their sensory understanding of the world as they are transported from everyday living in Colorado into an entertaining and educational world of the future. Setting the stage, visitors will first enter the “News from the Future” Theater where they will experience news broadcasts from 50 years in the future. As they step onto the moving walkway, their journey begins by entering the central rotunda.
The Immortal Eight - The Immortal Eight are the eight most important future inventions of all times. The Central Rotunda will feature a 360-degree panorama image that incorporates images of each of these eight inventions. This backlit duratrans panorama will create a circular wrap around image of considerable size, melding the artistic landscape seamlessly from one invention to another.
Young Inventor Laboratory - Built around a playful architecture, and entering through a series of exhibits featuring future inventions, by kids for kids, young visitors will find a thousand ways to tease their minds. They will design and draft their own invention plans in the design studio. They will be able to build their own boat in the boat-works center and test their creations on an in-house river.
Challenging their inventive skills, one station will allow them to build and operate their own robots. Another will test their physical ability and give them tools for inventing their own exercise devices. A central theater will engage the young minds in a variety of topics ranging from invention stories, to physics demonstrations, to demonstrations of light, magnetism, biology, ecology, and other sciences.
Roadmap Project - All future invention exhibits will include a roadmap of the developments that have to happen for the idea exhibited to become achievable. Roadmaps will illustrate the progression of scientific discoveries that will need to be made along the way.
1.) Robotics Pavilion - A center stage with live robot demonstrations will feature state of the art robots, with an instructor talking about the history of robotics and the stages of advancement needed to create useful working robots. Exhibits will give viewers a glimpse of a future world where flying robots dock with our homes, pick up our trash, and carry it off. Similar types of robots will deliver water, recharge our home energy system, dispose of our trash, and deliver physical goods to our doorsteps.
2.) Energy Pavilion - Since several of the future invention submissions were centered around the idea of wireless power, a specially constructed theater (The Wireless Power lab) will give live demonstrations of the history and future of wireless power. Live Tesla coil demonstrations will tell about Tesla’s vision of powering the world wirelessly over 100 years ago. Exhibits will give viewers a glimpse of a future world of energy, with exhibits for such things as binary power, H2 power, photovoltaics, fusion, and other forms of power integrated into virtually every part of our lives.
3.) Space Commerce Pavilion - Many space-related future inventions require the visual context of three-dimensional space. For this reason, the Space Commerce pavilion will feature a planetarium to both display and analyze such things as space-based power stations, space mining, space tourism, and the space elevator. Exhibits will give showcase other space-related inventions such as colonization vehicles, terra forming technologies, space hotels, space cities, and much more.
4.) Smart Technologies Pavilion - The trend has been to make the interface with the human brain as quick and seamless as possible, and to offload basic decision-making tasks to an emerging category of smart products. The next wave of the Internet will pave the way for objects talking to other objects. Exhibits will showcase a variety of “intelligent products” capable of talking with other products and making decisions on their own.
5.) Entertainment Pavilion - Entertainment has been pushing the envelope of technical capabilities with emerging forms of holography, interactivity, three dimensionality, and customizable avatars. But this pavilion will take our thinking one or two steps farther. Entertainment Pavilion exhibits will give viewers examples of other entertainment-related inventions such as personality modules, dream recorders, holography theaters, and much more.
6.) Transportation Pavilion - While flying cars are approaching viability, an operating system for these cars to interface with remains undefined. The system would include such things as directionally layered airspace, collision avoidance systems, automated navigation systems, and side-of-the-building parking structures. Future transportation exhibits will include pod cars, through-the-earth transports, hoverboards, and anti-gravity speeders.
7.) Communications Pavilion - Trends point toward a desire for direct mind-to-mind communications; however telepathy, or technology-assisted telepathy, will only be part of the future communication equation. Besides our desire for human-to-human forms of communication, the future will allow for human-to-animal, human-to-plant, and human-to-object communications. Exhibits will include inter-planetary communication systems, inter-earth communication systems, human-to-computer brain downloads and uploads, talking plants, artificial human memory inducers, and much more.
8.) Nanotechnology Pavilion - Making the invisible visible will be one of the challenges in giving visitors a feel for the ultra-tiny world of nanotechnology. Exhibits will explain how we will be able to control of the structure of matter based on molecule-by-molecule control of products and byproducts; the products and processes of molecular manufacturing, including molecular machinery. Electron and scanning tunneling microscopes will be used to make the nano world come to life.
9.) Genetic Engineering Pavilion - The genetic revolution will lead to great advances in the relief of human suffering and the treatment of human diseases. We will witness genetic cures for diseases like cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and mental retardation. Exhibits will help visitors gain a sense of our yet untapped genetic engineering potential with such things as human cloning, regrowing severed limbs, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and fix the age old problem of human aging.
10.) Life Sciences Pavilion - Many people anticipate the day when medical applications give way to the widespread deployment of implants that help us in our everyday lives. Exhibits will give viewers examples of future life-related inventions such as cyborgs, downloading the human brain, therapeutic amnesia, improving plant and animal intelligence, and much more.
11.) Environmental Pavilion - As the population of earth grows, and the demand for goods and services increases, the demands placed on the environment will intensify. Exhibits will give viewers examples of future life-related inventions as hydrogen energy solutions, detoxification systems for radioactive nuclear waste, clean, efficient recycling of solid waste, DNA depositories of all living species to prevent loss of endangered species, and much more.
12.) Unclassified Pavilion - Many of the ideas for future inventions don’t fit into any of the major categories listed above. Exhibits will include the flash dark, the self-cleaning house, invisibility, instant sleep, the dream clique, air wells, spray-on clothing, miniature pets, underground farming, and much more.
Traveling Exhibit Showcase - A special area of the museum will be set aside for traveling exhibits that bring a fresh new perspective to the future world we are trying to portray. Traveling exhibits will be rotated on a quarterly basis to help keep the museum content fresh and alive.
Plasma Screen Exhibits - A series of large plasma screens will be strategically placed around the museum to display a series of uncategorized inventions. Each plasma screen will display 10 different future inventions on a 20-minute rotation schedule.
Gift Shop - People exiting the museum will enter into a gift shop filled with posters, books, educational materials, t-shirts, caps, mugs, and other personal mementos to help visitors remember their experience and educated them on other aspects of the future.
Classroom/Workshop Facilities - Additional facilities will provide for K-12 education workshops, university courses, entrepreneur workshops, brainstorming sessions, and corporate training.
Research & Development Lab – The working R&D lab will be viewable to all visitors entering the Museum. However, select visitors will be offered insider tours of the behind-the-scenes workshops, software development operations, video production facilities, the archive of future inventions not exhibited yet, and much more. The R&D lab will include a library of invention, innovation, creativity, futurist thinking, etc
“Taste of the Future” Café - People who are hungry will have a chance to dine on tomorrow’s food.
In Conclusion… Our goal is to create an experience that will profoundly change the lives of each person who spends a day in the museum. We think that’s an achievable goal. |
