A new app developed in a collaboration between the Design Incubation Centre (DIC) and the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (LKCNHM) at NUS has been unveiled as part of the museum’s eighth anniversary celebrations.
The Digital Naturalist (LKCNHM* App) is designed to provide visitors with an enhanced and interactive museum experience using Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies embedded in the museum’s exhibits.
The app is an adaptation of Musee*, a project originally designed by Hoang Ahn, a class of 2020 graduate from the Division of Industrial Design.
Following Anh’s graduation, Musee* was incubated at DIC where further developments were made and collaborations with museums were initiated.
The DIC is part of the Division of Industrial Design (DID) at CDE, with a mission to incubate ideas and projects, supporting DID undergraduates and graduates to bring their projects to commercial reality.
Designed as a digital experience overlaying the actual content, the new app takes visitors on an immersive understanding of the natural history museum’s heritage gallery, encouraging users to "think, act and feel like a naturalist".
By interacting with NFC checkpoints, users of the app unlock activities and information about the exhibits, including key discoveries by naturalists such as 19th-century explorer Alfred Russel Wallace.
Launching the app at the museum’s anniversary celebration, Associate Professor Christophe Gaubert, Director of the DIC, said the app was designed particularly to appeal to younger visitors to the exhibits, using smartphones to reveal hidden knowledge.
“The idea is to hide information as a treasure hunt to make it more exciting to find and to augment the visit with a digital, playful layer,” he said. “The goal is to better connect with the content and also to continue with the experience after the visit - and to invite the visitor to come back and maybe discover more the next time.”
Speaking at the same event, the Head of the museum, Associate Professor Darren Yeo, said the app was a “very good example of collaboration between units of the university”.
The app features four main activities in the form of ‘chapters’, each providing learning outcomes and topics tailored to the museum’s exhibits:
- Packing for an Expedition
- Into the City
- Obtaining Specimens
- A New Discovery
The Digital Naturalist (LKCNHM* App) is available for download from the App Store and Google Play Store.
