Antopia

Immersive exhibition invites you into the secret world of ants at Melbourne Museum.

  • Melbourne Museum
  • 5
    immersive environments
  • 40
    min dwell time
  • Silhouette of woman stands in front of projection art during immersive exhibition Antopia by S1T2.
  • Woman stands in darkness watching immersive projection environment at interactive experience Antopia.
  • Two girls look at orange ant eggs in Antopia immersive exhibition at Melbourne Museum.
  • Woman and child build fungus towers with puzzle pieces in immersive exhibition Antopia.
  • People stand in queen ant projection in immersive exhibition Antopia from S1T2 and Melbourne Museum.
  • Man walks through huge blades of grass in front of projection artwork at Antopia.
  • People interact with floor projections and interactive tracking as part of Antopia immersive exhibition.
  • Person walks through interactive projection tracking creating trail of ants in Antopia.
  • Woman enters Antopia projection artwork at Melbourne Museum.

Antopia is a story-driven interactive experience that explores the complexities of life within the superorganism of an ant colony. Created in partnership with Museums Victoria, the immersive exhibition fuses world-leading real-time visual effects with the latest interactive experience design to invite visitors into the spectacle of the screen. At its heart, Antopia is an exploration of the next generation of stories; stories that are not so much told as they are made by those experiencing them.

Uncover a world of secret senses at Melbourne Museum, 14 December 2024 – 10 March 2025.

Simple stylised concept art of ant bridging created by S1T2 as part of Antopia pre-production.

Transforming complexity into wonder

The Brief

Following the success of our first collaboration, TYAMA, Melbourne Museum wanted to invite visitors back into an immersive world — this time focused on the lives of ants. Backed by 950sqm of exhibition space and an intricate system of 35 projectors and 65 speakers, the idea was to explore how complex scientific ideas might be communicated in ways that would captivate and inspire audiences of all ages.

Creating a world of possibilities

Concept

We began by collaborating with the Melbourne Museum team and their scientific experts to get a better understanding of the stories we might be able to tell. Through a series of workshops we worked out the core messaging and overall journey of the experience, as well as the key learnings we wanted visitors to come away with.

Research and references hang on the walls during a workshop between Melbourne Museum and S1T2 for Antopia.

We found a plethora of interesting and unexpected stories about how life unfolds in an ant colony. Tying them together was the superorganism: a living system where countless tiny lives form something far greater than their sum. And thus we found our core creative question: How could we not just show audiences an ant colony, but invite them to become a part of it?

Character sketches for the worker ant featured in Melbourne Museum Antopia.
Early concept art for Antopia, developed by experience design studio S1T2, shows an ant walking through underground tunnels.

Find the collective through the individual

Agency

Just like you can’t experience the fullness of humanity in a single image, understanding ants would require meeting them face-to-face. Antopia needed to be a place where visitor perceptions and expectations would be challenged in a playful, interesting way. An experience where visitors could become active participants; where they could relate personally to individual ants while understanding the power of the superorganism.

Discover the world according to ants

Narrative

You have been invited by a colony of ants to enter their nest, and experience life from their point of view. As you enter, the ants will guide you through a magical transformation, shrinking you down to size and coating you with the colony’s pheromones. 

Pheromones are how ants communicate; a whole language that humans can’t perceive. While you’re visiting, the ants have granted you pheromone vision, so you can help them gather food, care for their babies, and commune with the queen.

Believable ants in AI

Programming

Simulating the complexity of a superorganism meant that we needed to invest every ant within our colony with behaviours that were predictable yet emergent. This was a mammoth task, especially given the sheer number of ants involved. We experimented with a few approaches within Unreal Engine, including Mass AI, before landing on using Unreal’s State Tree with Smart Object Subsystem for a modular and scalable behaviours.

Once we had a reliable system to procedurally generate ants and govern their behaviour, it was time to think about the character and personality of our ants. We inserted hand-crafted animations into the system, giving our ants a stronger sense of character and personality. These are not animatronics stuck on a loop, but believable beings with lives separate from the visitors observing and interacting with them.

Interactions that are cohesive + communal

Mechanics

When it came to interaction mechanics, we knew from the start that we wanted to tap into ants’ own language — pheromones — to unlock the secrets of the superorganism. 

Through concepting and experimentation, we landed on a simple but powerful idea: using a single core mechanic that would carry across the entire exhibition.

No matter where they were, visitors would be able to use their pheromone trail to collect and redistribute ants throughout the nest. Repeating this mechanic would mean that visitors could spend less time figuring out how to interact and more time noticing what happens when they do.

This choice did introduce a number of technical challenges, namely the need to track every visitor’s movement across every room. But we were confident the behind-the-scenes complexity would be worth it for the simplicity and subtlety this approach would offer to audiences.

A vibrant world revealed through secret senses

Art Direction

Pheromones trails were not only the core interaction mechanic, but also the driving aesthetic force of the Antopia immersive exhibition. This would be a world perceived through the senses of the ants themselves, where pheromones are registered in a visual spectrum of vibrant colours, layered with meaning. We wanted visitors to see the colony as the ants would, revealing new dimensions with their every interaction.

  • Concept art for worker ant character in Antopia immersive experience created by experience studio S1T2.
  • People immerse themselves in outside-themed projection environment for Antopia.
  • Sketches of sample layouts for scale created during art pre-production at creative studio S1T2.
  • Concept artboard created by experience design studio S1T2 as part of pre-production for Antopia.
  • Silhouette of woman stands in front of projection art during immersive exhibition Antopia by S1T2.
  • Concept artwork for the Outside area of Melbourne Museum’s Antopia.
  • Concept artwork of ant pheromone trails revealing the colony in Antopia immersive experience.
  • Concept art character sketches for queen ant in Melbourne Museum’s Antopia.

Balancing visuals against performance

Prototyping

Given the centrality of the pheromone trails, we spent a long time prototyping their look, feel and behaviour. Our art and development teams worked together to find a balance between visual style and computational performance. All with the goal of ensuring the world we were creating felt surprising, wondrous and alive.

Eventually we settled on a pipeline backed by Unreal Engine’s Niagara particle system. This approach provided us with the flexibility and performance needed to create our visually mesmerising yet highlight dynamic pheromone trails. Meanwhile, updates to nDisplay meant that we would be able to achieve a technical system that was more stable and performant, even with such intensive visuals.

Early prototyping and testing for the Antopia immersive exhibition at Melbourne Museum.

Building a shared world

Collective

All of these creative and technical choices — art direction, mechanics, programming — were in service of a single goal: shaping not just a world, but an experience visitors could truly live inside. The real magic happened when these elements came together in the exhibition space, unlocking new forms of collective engagement and playful discovery.

  • Woman stands in darkness watching immersive projection environment at interactive experience Antopia.
  • Work-in-progress screenshot shows mock up of outside projection environment for Antopia.
  • Stylised concept art experiments with the art direction for outside environment in Antopia.

The Outside is a great example of how simplicity and consistency of interaction can leave space for collective engagement. Here, the shared play space and clear goal encouraged strangers to band together to help the ants build bridges through the environment. This took people out of their heads and into the physical experience, providing a sense of genuine collective joy that not only deepened engagement, but promoted longer-lasting memories.

Physical interaction drives the digital world

Interactivity

In the Queen’s Chamber, we again focused on the idea of collective engagement. Here, visitors took part in a physical action that shaped the progression of the digital world. Each individual contribution built toward a shared outcome — the more people played together, the bigger the reward.

By executing our interaction in Unreal Engine and nDisplay, we minimised the gap between user input and its effect on the digital world. This immediacy meant that in spaces like the Queen’s Chamber, visitors could feel a real sense of ownership as the experience unfolded.

Hybrid spaces build immersive experience

Immersion

In the Pantry, the digital world acted more as a virtual set extension than the main interactive focus. On screen, ants busily cut leaves and feed them to the fungus farms that sustain their colony. Meanwhile, visitors mirror the ants’ behaviour and assemble their own fungal towers with physical puzzle pieces. The result was a simple, joyful hands-on activity enhanced by the immersive real-time graphics unfolding in the background.

From understanding to empathy

Intimacy

Our goal wasn’t just to teach visitors about ants — it was to help them feel a real connection. To build that kind of empathy, we needed more than awe-inspiring scale or playful interactivity; we needed to create an emotional bridge between visitors and the ants themselves.

While we wanted visitors to understand the colony as a collective, we also created moments of connection with individual ants. In the Nursery, quieter moments helping ants care for their young turn abstract science into something visitors can feel, as well as understand.

Captivating the imagination of thousands

Results

Drawing crowds of 32,800 visitors over 3 months, Antopia captivated audiences with the wonders beneath our feet, igniting curiosity and wonder for the natural world at its tiniest. Indeed, by the time you venture back from the nest, you’ll understand that ants have their own societies — different from ours, but just as sophisticated.

Through innovative, playful and experiential storytelling, visitors big and small will be blown away by the eye-opening new perspectives they will gain from this captivating exhibition.

Lynley Crosswell
Museums Victoria CEO

Collective, immersive storytelling in museums

Impact

A spiritual continuation of  TYAMA, Antopia too explores the untapped potential of storytelling and technology in the museum. The exhibition breaks new ground in communicating complex scientific ideas in ways that are both entertaining and enlightening. And more than this, it experiments with the power of communal storytelling; with how we can use interactivity and immersion to connect audiences to not just content, but one another in meaningful and memorable ways.

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