Singapore museums seem to have been about two things this past year: taking you into the forest and doing that through snazzy immersive digital technology. After ArtScience Museum’s Future World exhibition, and then National Museum’s more recent Story of the Forest in the Glass Rotunda, the former does it again with a virtual exhibition, Into the Wild, which opens Feb 11, in collaboration with a couple tech companies.
The star of the show is the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, the first smartphone to have Google’s augmented reality platform Tango and whose 3D sensors track motion, sense depth and other good stuff that allow it to figure out where in the room you are, and superimpose directions and, in this case, forest environments and creatures into your screen. Here’s how it works: you register, get a smartphone and experience a day as a ranger in Rimbang Baling forest in Indonesia. There are animals to be sighted, trapped critters to be rescued, sapling samples to be collected and even trees to be planted.
Here’s something interesting: if you pay $38, a tree you plant in the virtual world will be matched by a real tree planting by the villagers of Rimbang Baling. So your weekend excursion would be helping to conserve one of the last habitats for pangolins, Sumatran tigers, orangutan, mouse deer and Malayan tapir.
Admission is free. You can find out more here.
