Invisible Worlds

Now Open

Additional ticket required. Free for Members.
Floor 3, Gilder Center - Enter via Susan S. and Kenneth Wallach Gallery

Visitors stand inside the Invisible Worlds immersive theater, surrounded by projections.

Matt Shanley and Alvaro Keding/© AMNH

Explore nature’s hidden realms, and discover how all life on Earth is connected in this new immersive experience.

Invisible Worlds explores networks of life at all scales—including some that are too fast, too small, or too slow for the human eye. At key moments, you'll become part of the story as your movements affect the projections around you.

[MUSIC]

[The life-sized blue whale model suspended in the Museum's Hall of Ocean Life.]

Text on-screen: At the American Museum of Natural History, we've always opened windows into incredible worlds...

[A diorama in the Hall of Ocean Life displays a view above and below the ocean's surface. A pod of dolphins swims in the water and leaps out of it.]

Text on-screen: Now you can walk through.

[The diorama scene dissolves into an animated version of the diorama—the dolphin pod chases a school of fish.]

[MUSIC SWELLS]

Text on-screen: Many of life's connections are too fast...

[Neurons flash as electrical signals race between them.]

Text on-screen: too slow...

[An animation of microorganisms and nutrients cycling through the soil of a rainforest.]

Text on-screen: too vast...

[Animated flock of parrots soars into the sky above a rainforest tree canopy.]

Text on-screen: ...or too tiny to see with the human eye.

[Strands of DNA unwind and twist together in a double helix.]

Text on-screen: Welcome to INVISIBLE WORLDS

[An animated blue whale, surrounded by a cloud of blue bioluminescent organisms swims across the screen, leaving a swirling, glowing wake as it swishes its tail.]

Text on-screen: An immersive experience debuting at the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, American Museum of Natural History. Opens May 4, 2023.

Reserve Museum Tickets »
Select the number of tickets, and date/time for Museum entry, and you will be then able to add Invisible Worlds, and/or additional ticketed exhibitions during checkout.

Related and Connected

Before entering the immersive experience, explore the themes that connect life on Earth across thousands of miles, millions of species, and billions of years in the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Gallery.

Discover why your hand resembles a bat's wing. Find out how organisms interact in ecosystems, including as part of complex food webs. And consider the ultimate social network: cells relaying impulses to neighboring cells in the human brain.

Become Part of the Story

Enter the venue at any point in the story to begin your journey through Invisible Worlds, an immersive experience based on authentic scientific data visualized like never before.

Iwan Baan

Travel through the layers of a lush rainforest in Brazil to explore how living things feed, shelter, and support each other from the root network in the soil to the leafy canopy high above the forest floor.

Dropping into New York City from above, glimpse networks of satellites tracing Earth's orbit and some of the ways humans connect with each other, and with nature, in Central Park, before delving into the complex network of the human brain.

Follow a vertical migration of jellyfish and microscopic plankton that feed on the algae at the ocean's surface—and encounter a majestic humpback whale.

Members See it Free!

Members see the Invisible Worlds immersive experience free on every visit!

Join Today »

Capacity is limited to maintain health and safety.

Length: 12-minute looping immersive experience

Showtimes: Ongoing

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The American Museum of Natural History gratefully acknowledges Raymond James as the inaugural sponsor of Invisible Worlds.