We went to the Grossology exhibit at the local museum this weekend (The Fernbank here in Atlanta). The latest trend in museums seems to be these traveling exhibits. I guess its a way for museums to bank on past visit figures from other venues without spending their own money on exhibition development. It feels a little McMuseum to me, but sometimes the exhibits are good.

Anyway, Grossology is all about "The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body," even though the science is pretty thin; it's more like a little tiny theme park or playground. Exhibits included Up Your Nose, a giant faucet-headed animatron, the Vomit Center, a sort of digestion machine, and -- the one I'll be talking about here -- Urine: The Game. Urine claims to "teach visitors how the kidneys remove waste from the blood." It's set up as a large rear-projection television with a trackball and button console mounted in front.

The player sits on a cushion and plays on the screen. Two CRT displays mounted at the players flanks allow onlookers to watch the progress. The game screen depicts two side-by-side tracts, one a red (blood vessel) and one yellow (renal artery? or something kidney related). Objects move toward the player through the blood vessel in 3d space and the player has to decide whether to leave the objects in the bloodstream or move them to the urinary tract for removal. Objects include blood cells (red and white), water, sugar, potassium, sodium, urea. The player used the trackball to grab the undesirable objects with the cursor, clicked to grab, moved to the other side, and released. I'm sorry I don't have a picture; it was the one time in weeks I didn't bring my cameraphone.

It's not a bad game design really. The objects trajectories sped up as time went on, making it more difficult. But, the player didn't really learn anything about what potassium, sodium, and urea are, or why you'd want to get rid of all those things (and water) and route them to pee. Moreover, the gameplay was so abstracted from the actual mechanisms of kidney function that no one could gain any understanding about how the process works. The game did a reasonably good job of moving players through the exhibit, but there were also major technical problems. The rear-projection TV had serious burn-in from the game's main menu, which apparently stayed idle when no one was playing. And the trackball was terribly inoperative; someone has probably spilled something gross into it. Anyway, an interesting idea with fair game execution and flawed installation execution.