After its successful foray into the world of augmented reality (AR) and 3D wayfinding with the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) mobile tour, GuidiGO has now brought Google’s Tango technology to the National Museum of Singapore.
Singapore’s oldest museum now allows its visitors to experience the building through an enhanced architectural tour. It tells the story of the building’s long history and its transformation from a Natural History Museum to the most significant historical museum of Singapore.
Visitors are given a Tango-compatible Lenovo Phab 2 Pro device, which will transport them back in time and enable them to see the architectural evolution of the building, how it looked like over a century ago and onwards, and the artefacts that used to be displayed in it. The digital tour, led by volunteer guides, evokes the museum’s imagery in a way that helps visitors obtain deeper understanding of its contents.
There are currently six tour stops that incorporate a range of AR experiences, such as:
The Building’s Evolution
The evolution of a 130-year-old building is bound to be an interesting one. Combining Tango technology’s ability to both augment and recreate reality, visitors are able to see the replica of the museum’s transformation throughout the decades.
The Museum’s Rotunda
The old rotunda used to display a natural history collection, as well as a marble bust of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. Through the lens of their device, visitors can walk around a life-size model of the room, surrounded with the original artefacts that once graced it, and see the clay tiles instead of the current marble flooring.
The Indian Fin Whale
This iconic 42-feet-long skeleton used to be displayed in the museum in the early 1900s, until it was returned to Malaysia in the 1970s. Thanks to Tango technology, visitors can once again see its fossil under the glass passage on the second floor, where it once stood. However, that’s not all – they can also witness the reimagining of how it looked and sounded like while it was still alive.