Client: National Museum of Singapore. Year: 2025. Produced through: CraveFX.
An immersive, large-scale interactive journey through 700 years of Singapore's history, experienced as a spatial, responsive environment inside the Glass Rotunda.
The question
How do you turn a monumental architectural space into an experience that visitors actively move through rather than passively observe? Singapore Odyssea needed to support large audiences, continuous flow, and layered participation while remaining narratively legible and emotionally grounded. The challenge was to integrate sensing, interaction, and real-time media without fragmenting the experience or overwhelming the space.
The approach
The experience was designed as a spatial descent through time, where history unfolds as visitors move through the Rotunda. Rather than relying on explicit interfaces, interaction is embedded into the environment itself, using movement, presence, and proximity as the primary inputs. An interactive floor responds to visitors in real time, reinforcing the idea that history here is something you walk through.
Visitor progression and narrative moments are coordinated using a combination of RFID triggers and BLE-based companion tracking. RFID provides reliable activation points for key states and transitions, while BLE allows the system to understand user positions and pacing across the space without requiring direct user action.
Visually, the installation blends real-time graphics with pre-rendered cinematic sequences. Real-time content enables responsiveness and continuity as visitors move freely, while pre-rendered moments deliver visual density and emotional impact where precision and scale are critical. Playback is synchronised across the Rotunda using nDisplay clustered rendering to ensure frame-accurate alignment across large-format surfaces.
From a systems perspective, the installation was built for long-term public operation. State management, automated resets, and fault tolerance were designed in from the outset, allowing the experience to run continuously while remaining flexible for iteration and maintenance. The technology is intentionally quiet, supporting the narrative and spatial choreography rather than drawing attention to itself.
Selected images
Historical panoramic projection wherein mythical companions follow you down the spiral ramp and reveal vignettes of Singapore's history.
Visitors walking through immersive projections with water ripple effects responding to movement on the floor. The waterfall parts to reveal more of the scene as they approach the wall.
Interactive well where visitors are invited to release their companions into the navel of the lake and awake the mythical giant crab
Behind-the-scenes during installation, with the team working on-site to calibrate and test systems.
The CraveFX production team celebrating at the Singapore Odyssea venue entrance after completion.
Reflection
Working on Singapore Odyssea clarified for me what it means to design interaction at architectural scale. The challenge was not inventing individual moments, but holding space, story, and system together as a single authored experience. It reinforced my belief that when interaction is embedded into movement, timing, and environment, technology can support presence without demanding attention. This project shaped how I think about leading complex interactive systems, where coherence matters more than any single effect.
The most difficult phase came at the very end, when ideas had to survive contact with real hardware, real space, and real constraints. As the final link in the delivery chain, it fell on us to integrate the interactive systems with the on-site infrastructure and ensure everything worked together as intended. This last mile was daunting. Many assumptions had to be re-evaluated, unexpected issues surfaced, and solutions often had to be found on the spot.
What carried the project through was a combination of strong partners and deep in-house problem solving. The process demanded calm decision-making, technical flexibility, and a willingness to adapt without compromising the core intent of the experience. Seeing the system finally come together in its full form was deeply affirming, not because it worked, but because it proved that complex ideas can be realised when design, engineering, and trust in the team are held in balance.