Lessons Learned:
Cretaceous Chaos attempted to seamlessly interweave interactive segments with an educational narrative. User testing revealed some good rules of thumb in dealing with interactive pieces for a large audience.

Continuous, synchronous interaction is more effective than branching, asynchronous interaction. Audiences felt like they had control in the canyon sequence, where they dynamically navigated left and right through a river. The beginning and the end of the piece employed interactions (voice and audience activity level, respectively) that led to branches in the narrative. In order for the audience to fully understand that they had options, they would need to see the show several times. The rules of the game need to be established imediately. The first thing that happens in Cretaceous Chaos is that the audience is asked "if they're ready to go see some dinosaurs" and the experience responds according to the volume of their vocal response. This immediately makes it clear to guests that they're participation is expected. The rules of the game need to be abided by. Cretaceous Chaos starts with an audio interaction, but the computer can only hear and respond to the audience at select times. There needed to be a clearer distinction as to when the audience could actually interact. Choices must be very clearly delineated. The initial canyon models did not provide enough lead time for audiences to see that they could steer down different paths. This issue was resolved in a later iteration. Employ social conventions...they work and they're free! During the launch sequence, ANDI invites the audience to count down with her. Without fail, every audience joined in with "5! 4! 3! 2! 1!"

Empirical Results:
Due to production-related constraints, the team was only able to collect limited data about the effectiveness of Cretaceous Chaos as an educational interactive piece. Quizzes administered to select audiences before and after viewing indicated that 10, 11, and 12 year olds learned, by watching the show, the key information that the team hoped to convey -- namely, the difference between reptiles and dinosaurs and theorized dinosaur eating habits. More data is required to draw any concrete conclusions.

Challenges and the Future:
This was an ambitious project of considerable scope. Unfortunately, the technical infrastructure is not yet robust enough to reliably handle the load of a 15 minute show completely rendered in real time. Numerous production elements had to be scaled back substantially in order to get a decent frame rate even a fraction of the time.

The ETC's Panoramic Real-time Interaction System currently renders with a single PC. For the future, the system will inevitably have to evolve to employ multiple networed PC's if it is to handle production-level content.

Cretaceous Chaos will be submitted for consideration to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's education and marketing departments. If nothing else, it will routinely run as an extra event for summer camp and overnight groups at the museum.