Singapore museum adds an interactive virtual forest
This is one unusual forest that visitors aren't likely to forget soon.
At the National Museum of Singapore, a new permanent exhibit will come alive as more people fill the room.
Housed in a three-story deep circular structure, visitors enter at the top floor into a dark room with a panoramic full-ceiling projection of falling petals.
Pushing a curtain aside, they're then invited to walk down a 144-meter (472 ft) spiral pathway. The walls along it show vivid laser-projected animals running through a forest.
The landscape designers, Japanese digital art collective teamLab, were inspired by Southeast Asia's ecology, says Angelita Teo, the museum's director.
TeamLab has also tried to extend the interactivity of the forest via an augmented reality app, called "Story of the Forest."
Riding on the popularity of Pokémon Go, the app encourages users to find and collect animals by pointing at the critters as they appear in the digital mural to "capture" them.
Finally, visitors are led down to the lower chamber, where they enter a room with an interactive forest that rains petals on them and sprouts new trees as they approach.
Sensors on the floor detect when there are people near and the foliage thickens as crowds gather.
The concept connects the idea of community with nature, explain teamLab's founder, Toshiyuki Inoko.
He added that the entire installation is the most challenging that the team has executed.
The Japanese art and technology collective recently put up a 3,000-square-meter (32,291-square-foot) kaleidoscopic show of color and light within a dome in Tokyo. The "universe" was created with rows and rows of LED lights whose color and intensity changed in response to people walking through the space.
The virtual forest exhibit is at the Glass Rotunda at the National Museum of Singapore. You can download "Story of the Forest" for iPhone and Android ahead of your visit.
Topics Augmented Reality
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
