The Royal Ontario Museum has introduced a new way to experience their exhibits. With their new app, “ROM Ultimate Dinosaurs”, you can now have a whole new augmented reality experience, when in the ROM. You open the app on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad and point the camera at one of the ads or markers with a black frame. Then, in the app, you will see more content and even see the dinosaurs come to life!
This app lets you experience some unusual new dinosaurs in surprising new ways.
Bring dinos to life in the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM’s) time-limited exhibition Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana, presented by investment dealer Raymond James Ltd. Augmented reality (AR) technology allows you to learn more about select dinos, and virtually flesh out a dinosaur skeleton.
Bring this app to the ROM, or use the iPad mobile digital devices provided in the exhibition.
You can also experience AR on select advertising for the exhibition. Look for ROM transit shelter ads around the Greater Toronto Area and other materials that include AR instructions.
The dinos are waiting for you!
Reuters had a chance to chat with Tracy Ruddell, assistant vice president of marketing at the ROM. She had this to say about the new experience: “We can see what they would have looked like with skin on when they were alive and how they would have moved and behaved. As a museum we’re all about real-world objects, but being able to bring prehistoric dinosaurs back to life was a pretty amazing thing. Augmented reality allows us to do things with objects that we could never do in the physical world because, of course, we still have to preserve the specimens. It also allows us to provide educational information, and really stories, about these objects that are difficult to do in traditional means.”
I don’t live in Toronto, so I don’t have first hand experience with the app, but I would love to see this at the museum in my town. If you do live in the Toronto area, download the app and head over to the ROM and check it out! The App is in the App Store now, for free!
