The Natural History Museum in London opened Visions of Nature, a ticketed mixed reality visitor experience, on 24 October 2024. It runs in the Zoology Spirit Building of the Museum's Darwin Centre, with timed sessions from 10:15 to 16:45 and a run time of roughly 20 minutes. Tickets are £9.95 (£7.95 for Members), and the experience is restricted to ages 10 and over because of the size of the headsets.
Visitors wear Microsoft HoloLens 2 mixed reality headsets and are transported 100 years into the future, to 2125, to see how the natural world might respond to the decisions taken today. The Museum describes eight different ecosystems, "from harmonious highlands to resilient rainforests, and even down to the depths of the Arctic Ocean", including the Scottish Highlands and the Great Green Wall in Africa's Sahel region. Because the headsets are optically see-through, visitors continue to see the room and the people around them while interactive holographic animations are anchored in the gallery alongside a selection of the Museum's physical specimens.
The imagined futures were built on IPCC scenarios and developed with Museum scientists. Species featured include a cuttlefish, Darwin's frog, a coconut crab and 'narlugas' — hybrid narwhal-beluga whales imagined as thriving after the loss of Arctic ice sheets. A built-in scientific copilot called Hope narrates each scene and prompts visitor action: at one stop, visitors hold out a hand to greet a Darwin's frog, which then leaps away into an urban park in Concepción, Chile. Hand gestures of this kind, along with the fact that reactions can be shared with others taking part, are what make the experience interactive rather than a played-back film.
The experience was created as a partnership between the Natural History Museum, Microsoft and SAOLA Studio, a creative studio that produces immersive augmented reality work for cultural venues and has also delivered experiences at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and Nausicaá in Boulogne-sur-Mer. It forms part of the Museum's Fixing Our Broken Planet advocacy programme, which encourages visitors to reflect on their environmental impact.
The Museum reported that Visions of Nature was experienced by more than 52,000 visitors during 2025, in a year when the Museum as a whole drew a record 7.1 million visitors. The experience was still being listed and sold more than eighteen months after opening.
