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New App Helps Burpee to Share Wonders By Sara Graves nne Weerda wants you to love the natural world. “You can’t ask someone to love something, or to save something, if they haven’t developed a relationship with it,” says Weerda, who is the executive director of Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford. The museum has always invited people through its doors to explore, but now it also has a way of taking its wonders to the community ouside its doors, through a new augmented reality app, the only application of its kind. Developed by Trekk, a local techdriven creative service agency that donated 100 percent of the time it spent creating the app, this technology currently has three major components used inside and outside of the museum building. An in-house feature includes
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informative videos that play when certain items in the museum are scanned. Another allows for a massive 3-D animated image – such as a dinosaur – to pop up in the room. “It’s like the ultimate pop-up book,” says Weerda. An augmented reality feature can be used anywhere. Place a North American Beaver skull on the floor of a classroom – through the app, of course – then enlarge it and allow students to virtually walk inside the skull to look at it from all angles. There are currently nine objects that can be viewed in this way, including several dinosaur bones and some items from the museum’s Native American collection. Weerda plans to continue bolstering what’s available in Burpee’s app, using more items from the museum’s collection that teachers can showcase in their
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classrooms. Currently, this emergent technology is only available on Apple’s iOS operating system, but Weerda hopes a majority of the features will be available for Android users by spring. Also available on the app is BurpeeCast Kids, a podcast in which kids ask questions by recording them via voice memo on any smartphone and emailing them to the museum. A scientist at Burpee might answer them on the next episode.
