Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose’s Tech Museum welcomes tinkerers in all things electronic. Its latest exhibit takes this idea a step further, inviting visitors to play with the underpinnings of life itself. The first bio-tinkering space in a U.S. museum, its BioDesign Studio lets visitors of all ages explore the intersection of engineering and biology by creating lifeforms from the building blocks of life. And it’s made vivid on a yawning 30-foot screen, powered by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.


Visitors are guided through the process of creating a set of biological instructions for a living thing, using tangible pieces that serve as stand-ins for genes and genetic parts. The end result resembles something you might see swimming under a microscope. The creature is then “released” into an immersive, simulated environment of an arc-shaped screen running off 11 projectors. Thousands of creatures are designed by museum visitors each week.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Bioengineering Comes Alive at Silicon Valley’s Tech Museum