Singapore’s oldest museum has all kinds of stories about history and heritage to tell — and if you’d like to discover what secrets the building holds, look no further than its new architectural tour. But before you get distracted by another story about cute puppies or cats doing crazy things, this is no ordinary trail of a dusty, 130-year-old museum. It’s a digital journey, one that will throw you back in time to experience the evolution of the National Museum over the years — and it’s created in collaboration with Tango, a technology platform by Google that enables smartphone augmented reality.
Basically, all you need is a Tango-enabled mobile device and a volunteer guide to furnish you with the museum’s untold tales for an hour.
Thanks to the wonders of virtual reality, augmented reality and indoor mapping, you can explore the space to glimpse highlights like a 3D virtual replica of the building that you can navigate around to watch its transformation over the decades, a ‘Time machine’ view that features artefacts (like the marble bust of Sir Stamford Raffles) that were on exhibit in the 1950s, and a view of the museum’s iconic 42-feet-long Indian Fin Whale skeleton, which was displayed under the second storey Glass Passage in 1907, before it was returned to Malaysia in the 1970s.
The Architectural Tours will run from Apr 22 at the National Museum of Singapore. Registration is free, on a first come, first served basis.
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