Project Spotlight: How We Created an Immersive Projection for the Natural History Museum

Project Spotlight: How We Created an Immersive Projection for the Natural History Museum

How do you make something as vast and distant as Mars feel close enough to explore?

For the Natural History Museum’s Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? exhibition, the answer involved a seven-metre-wide projection, NASA data, sound, wind, interaction - and a careful balance between scientific accuracy and imagination.

The Mars installation was one of three immersive moments created by Sarner for the exhibition. Rather than presenting another layer of information, the aim was to give visitors a chance to experience the planet itself and consider what it might once have been like.

Starting with the science

The experience centres on Jezero Crater, the Martian landscape explored by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The visual content was inspired by NASA topographic data, providing a scientifically grounded starting point for the projection. From there, the team developed a two-minute sequence following a Martian day - moving from sunrise through dust storms and meteorite impacts to the activity of the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter.

The challenge was to make this information understandable without turning the experience into a conventional presentation.

Instead, the projection allows the landscape itself to tell the story.

Making Mars feel alive

One of the most important decisions was to introduce movement and change.

Mars is often imagined as a static, red landscape. In reality, it is a dynamic environment shaped by weather, geology and time.

The projection therefore moves through different conditions, allowing visitors to see the landscape change around them. Sound adds another layer, while carefully timed gusts of wind during the dust storms provide a physical connection to what is happening on screen.

These effects are deliberately restrained. They are there to reinforce the story rather than compete with the projection.

Looking into Mars' past

The installation also explores a much bigger question: could Mars once have supported life?

At certain points, the main narrative pauses and visitors can activate interactive "windows into the past". These reveal interpretations of Mars at very different points in its history - including a world of oceans, blue skies and river valleys, and an earlier volcanic landscape dominated by lava and fire.

This was an opportunity to move beyond simply showing visitors what Mars looks like today.

The experience asks them to imagine what the planet might have looked like billions of years ago, when its environment was potentially very different.

Designing an experience, not just a projection

A projection of this scale can easily become a passive viewing experience. The design therefore considers how visitors move through the space and how they interact with the content.

The result is less like watching a film and more like spending a few minutes inside a changing landscape.

That distinction was important to the wider exhibition design. The immersive moments were designed to complement the Museum's scientific content, providing opportunities for emotional and reflective engagement alongside more information-rich displays.

Where science meets imagination

There is an interesting balance at the heart of an exhibition about life beyond Earth.

Much of what we know about Mars can be supported by evidence. But the question of whether life ever existed there remains unanswered.

The installation reflects that uncertainty. It doesn't attempt to provide a definitive answer. Instead, it gives visitors enough scientific context to understand why researchers are interested in Mars - and enough space to wonder about what might have been.

That approach continues into the exhibition's final immersive experience, where scientifically informed but entirely speculative life forms emerge from a cosmic landscape.

The bigger picture

Creating the Mars projection was ultimately about more than visualising another planet.

It was about finding an accessible way to communicate scientific ideas that are difficult to experience first-hand: geological time, planetary change, the search for evidence of past environments and the possibility of life beyond Earth.

The technology provides the scale and immersion, but the underlying idea is simple - give visitors a different way to understand the science.

Sometimes, the most effective way to explain another world is to let people spend a few minutes there.