Have a heart MSI

[southsider2k5]

A cultural icon is gone...

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/c...0,2706535.story

 

Museum of Science and Industry gets a new heart display

Digital projections replace walk-through model of the organ

 

Tom Hennes is silhouetted against the images of his new heart display in the Museum of Science and Industry. The million-dollar beating heart is a technological wonder that will match a visitor's pulse. (Tribune photo by Nancy Stone / August 25, 2009)

 

Turns out it takes some digital wizardry to replace a broken heart that people used to walk all over.

 

Technicians at the Museum of Science and Industry were laboring Tuesday to fine-tune a new three-dimensional, 14-foot-tall animated heart that is replacing the museum's beloved old walk-through model.

 

The million-dollar beating heart is a technological wonder that will match a visitor's pulse while showing its exterior and interior workings, including valves opening and closing and electrical charges that stimulate its functions.

 

It will be part of a new $21.5 million permanent exhibit -- "You! The Experience" -- scheduled to open Oct. 8. The exhibit is designed to showcase for visitors how the human body works and how to make better decisions regarding health and mental well-being.

 

The exhibit will occupy the balcony of the museum's North Court. That was previously home to the big, colorful heart that had a passageway allowing people to walk through it. It had been a tremendously popular fixture since 1954.

 

The new transplant, while far more high-tech, has no such walk-through feature.

 

"We are aware of the nostalgia [for] the old heart, and we hope that will help people connect with this new exhibit," said Patricia Ward, the museum's director of science and technology.

 

The new heart's primary designer, Tom Hennes, president of the New York design firm Thinc, said the pulsing heart will be the core of the larger exhibit and should be noticeable from the main floor as it throbs in full color.

 

"We hope that people on the main floor will look up and see this great, beating heart and think, 'Wow, I have to get up there and see that thing up close,' " he said.

 

Up close, the heart exhibit normally beats on its own at a slow 60 beats a minute. But when a viewer grasps a pair of hand grips, the device picks up the person's pulse and the model heart beats along with the viewer's heart, as a display monitor shows the heartbeat."We are sure that the heart will provoke all kinds of unexpected interactions from viewers," said Hennes, who was at the museum Tuesday helping workers with final touches. "One of the guys working here learned how to put himself into a sort of a trance to slow his own heartbeat down while holding the grips."

 

Eight feet wide, the new heart is sculpted from steel plate that projects from the wall, appearing to be a living organ with full-color animations projected onto its surface from seven projectors.

 

Putting it all together turned out to be a two-year, international effort. Hennes' firm is doing exhibit work on the 9/11 museum under construction in New York. The imaging projected onto the heart was created by a Connecticut company, XVIVO, which specializes in creating medical animations.

 

The seven-projector system, built in Britain, uses two layers of video, one viewed through the other and controlled by image-blending software, creating the pulsating effect of the heart's outer wall. The hand-grip system that allows the model to mimic the viewer's heartbeat was adapted by a Chicago exercise equipment firm, Life Fitness.

 

"Nobody has ever built something like this before," said Hennes, "but this museum has this never-has-been-done-before sensibility that seems to be in its DNA, willing to bring people, ideas and material from all over the world to get something completely new."

 

The old, walk-through heart -- an iconic object that looms vividly in the memories of generations of museum visitors -- is gone.

 

Built of plaster around a building-support pillar, it could not be dismantled intact. It had to be broken into pieces, Ward said. Several families of workers who built the old heart got pieces as mementos, she said.

 

"It was very popular for many decades," Ward said, "but it was static, and we have so many new technologies now to make something like that come alive."

[Texsox]

Nooooooooooooo

[FlaSoxxJim]

Sounds like a great exhibit, but I absolutely loved the old model and it was a big part of my childhood. That and all the dead fetuses in pickle jars.

[HuskyCaucasian]

I just went to the MSI for the first time since I was in grade school... man was I impressed. My wife and I spent over an hour in just the Harry Potter exhibit that is there until the end of September. The rest of the pace was really cool. We didnt see everything, but I had a great time.

[CanOfCorn]

I just went to the MSI for the first time since I was in grade school... man was I impressed. My wife and I spent over an hour in just the Harry Potter exhibit that is there until the end of September. The rest of the pace was really cool. We didnt see everything, but I had a great time.

 

NERD ALERT!!!

 

Yeah, it's sad to see the Big ol' Honkin' Ugly Heart go...but it's time. I'm so looking forward to bringing my son there someday.

[almagest]

That heart was disgusting looking by the end. They stuck it on the 3rd floor balcony with all the broken exhibits and the indecipherable chemistry exhibit. The rest of the museum has really improved, though. They had a green home exhibit in the spring that was pretty amazing.