Whales Fantasium

The five rooms keep changing what the whale means

A floor-tracking room sends petroglyph-inspired animals across the walls when visitors move. By the fifth room, a Buddy Whale kept in the What a Ulsan app can be scanned into the large Oceanarium screen

Whales Fantasium opened in May 2023 inside Jangsaengpo Whale Culture Village after Ulsan converted the site’s old 5D theater into an interactive media attraction. The existing circular exhibition space was divided into five consecutive environments rather than one seated show

Porthole begins with the sea around Ulsan. Stepping Stone turns the floor into an input device, using tracking to trigger animals based on the Bangudae petroglyph tradition. Whale City shifts into a more expansive, invented Ulsan, placing whales around familiar city imagery. Memory Box moves backward through old photographs and records inside a mirrored, infinity-style room. Oceanarium ends the sequence by bringing a digital whale associated with the visitor onto a shared screen

The movement between those rooms is more important than any single projection effect. One local symbol is repeatedly recast: prehistoric carved animal, city emblem, memory object, future image and finally a digital companion

Bangudae keeps the media art tied to a real record

Stepping Stone contains the clearest example of how the attraction avoids generic underwater fantasy. Its animals were developed from the Bangudae petroglyphs, the prehistoric rock-carving site in the Ulsan region whose whale and hunting imagery is central to the city’s long public association with whales

The installation team identifies humpback whales, deer and tigers among the figures selected with expert advice. They do not appear as static reproductions of the rock face. The room releases them through particles and animation as visitors step through the tracked space

That choice broadens the room beyond whales alone. Bangudae records a larger animal world, and the installation preserves some of that variety before the later rooms narrow back toward Ulsan’s modern whale identity

Memory Box then compresses a different kind of record. Old photographs and images of Ulsan fill the mirrored room, including material from the city’s twentieth-century past. Whale City takes the opposite direction, using the city as a stage for an invented future. The sequence therefore moves between archaeological memory, photographic memory and digital speculation without asking the technology itself to supply the subject

The final whale starts on a phone

The fifth room is the one most likely to confuse an unprepared visitor because the personal whale is not drawn at an on-site kiosk. It comes from What a Ulsan, also called Wasseo Ulsan, the city’s smart-tourism app

Inside the app, the Buddy Whale feature lets users keep a virtual whale, give it a name and interact with it. At Fantasium, the whale’s QR code is scanned at the reader below the Oceanarium display. The same character then appears swimming with other digital whales on the large screen

That means the final interaction has a small technical prerequisite: the personal-whale part works best for someone who has already set up a Buddy Whale in the app. Visitors without one can still see the room and the shared aquarium, but the personalized appearance depends on that phone-based step

The app link also makes the attraction part of a wider tourism system rather than a self-contained media installation. What a Ulsan was developed to combine local attraction information, trip planning and smart-tourism functions, while Buddy Whale gives the Fantasium a character that can arrive with the visitor rather than being created only inside the building

Before you go

Whales Fantasium works as a short component of the wider Whale Culture Village rather than a long standalone museum visit. The five-room sequence is compact, and the surrounding village, whale museum and other Jangsaengpo facilities provide most of the day’s scale

The personal Oceanarium interaction depends on the What a Ulsan app. A Buddy Whale created there can be brought onto the fifth-room screen by scanning its QR code at the reader below the display, so that step is worth knowing before reaching the final room