American Museum of Natural History Explorer App
Technology Director
The American Museum of Natural History building is daunting to navigate, and contains a world of riches. It is almost impossible to navigate the whole space without a lot of prior research, or a personal guide. This is where the AMNH Explorer app comes in. It was designed as a personal blue-dot guide through the museum’s physical exhibition areas, but also as a tool to learn more about specific exhibits using an augmented reality (AR) feature in the app. The Explorer provides both turn-by-turn navigation for location contextual information, and an Augmented Reality experience to gamify the identification of multiple artifacts in the space.
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The app provided a mechanism to surface an endless amount of in-depth information about artifacts which had previously been limited by static placards.
The Explorer app integrates into the museum’s infrastructure and content management systems, allowing for both content updates and ticket management.
The implementation was a first-of-its-kind integration in a museum of this scale, using the artifacts themselves as object markers, rather than QR or other helper codes.
Building an AR solution with object recognition without markers (such as QR Codes) is not a simple feat. This was even more challenging in 2015, when cross-platform AR libraries were limited to Vuforia and Metaio (which was acquired by Apple in June 2015).
The app required an entirely new approach, to build an object recognition system from scratch! This was an impressive engineering feat thanks to Mobile App engineering partners Enharmonic.
Studio: Local Projects
Director of Technology / Systems Architect: Sundar Raman
Creative Director / Interaction Design Lead: John D. Ryan
Creative Technologist / Mobile: Enharmonic
Creative Engineer: Michael Dreiling