The Leonardo Museum

I'm married to a museum enthusiast. Not only does she work at a museum she loves to go to museums. This past Friday for our weekly date she chose to go to a museum called The Leonardo.  She was excited; I was less so. Just the name gave me worries. I like museums; but artsy modern art museums not so much. Wendy however had a hook, the museum was hosting a NASA moon rock. I agreed that if there was a moonwalk it couldn't be all too terrible. Remember the moon rock..I'll get to it later.

The museum ended up being a lot of fun. It resembled a science museum more than an art museum in its activities. One of the first things that we did upon entering was to play Dance, Dance, Google maps. Yep. They had Google maps projected through the floor and you controlled where the map scrolled and zoomed by jumping on arrows. It was surprisingly fun. Unfortunately it didn't transfer very well to either pictures or video.

Wendy Dance Dance Googling

Close to the Dance Dance Google display were several touch screens with a large display of Utah in front. You controlled the large screens with the touch panels. This display was capable of showing vital statistics for most of the cities in the state including: crimes, single-mothers, population and other things. The most important thing I learned? For all you West Valley City haters; Ogden was far worse than West Valley City in every crime category that was tracked.

Ben reviewing crime statistics for Utah

I'm assuming because the name of the museum was patterned after the inventor/artist there was a small area dedicated to Leonardo Da Vinci including a display describing his habit of writing all of his notes in mirror image. The display then challenged its readers to attempt to write something in mirror image as well. I failed miserably. I couldn't even write the simple three letter word that is my name. Wendy had slightly more success than I did. I just took her ten minutes to do it.

Wendy writing backwards

Another one of the displays focused on "Who am I?" The displays talked about genetics and so forth. It also talked about the importance of knowing who you are and accepting that. To help achieve this goal the museum provided a station in which you could draw a self portrait. Here's the process and results.

Ben drawing his portrait

Ben's Self-portrait

Wendy's portrait. She gave up.

The museum has a rotating display/art show. The rotating display and art show for this point in time spotlighted a group of highly talented, dedicated, and motivated women: Rollerderby girls. Wendy was so inspired by the display that she went out and became one. She liked this portrait more than the last.

Don't Mess with Madame Museum

We also found a motion capture studio where a animated character would imitate your movements. We did run into a small problem with Wendy's first try. The motion capture got confused with her maternity shirt flapping around. The animated character was doing some pretty impressive hip contortions as a result. Tucking in the shirt did result in a better copy of movements; but not nearly as entertaining. As my life was threatened if I posted a video of a pregnant woman dancing I'll post a video of myself.

Wendy and I had a profession change. For one day only we became weather forecasters. I can only tell you this. Watch out for the heat on Friday; it's going to get hot.

Our final activity involved little animated characters and moving them incrementally across a sheet of paper to tell a story. We also took pictures of this characters moving incrementally across the sheet of paper.

Stop motion animation

Results:

With that, our evening at the museum ended. We had only spent three hours inside the building reading, watching, and playing with the displays. We didn't realized that we had forgotten something until we walked outside and saw the NASA staff cleaning up. Remember that moon rock Wendy got me excited about? Yea, completely forgot about it and completely missed it.