Into the Wild

Into the Wild transformed over 1,000 square metres of ArtScience Museum into a living, augmented rainforest. Created by Singapore artist and filmmaker Brian Gothong Tan in partnership with WWF, Google, and Lenovo, the exhibition used augmented reality to place visitors inside the ecosystems of Sumatra — environments that, beyond the museum walls, were under severe pressure from deforestation and habitat loss. Pangolins, tapirs, mousedeer, orangutans, and Sumatran tigers moved through the space alongside visitors, made present by spatial computing in ways photography and film could not achieve.

The experience relied on Google's Tango technology, which combined real-time depth sensing, motion tracking, and spatial mapping to overlay the digital rainforest directly onto the physical museum environment. Visitors moved through the space using Lenovo Phab 2 Pro devices, their physical movement determining what they encountered. The work was not about simulation but presence: the sensation of sharing a habitat with animals whose survival depends on whether humans choose to act.

That connection between encounter and action was built into the structure of the exhibition. Every time a visitor planted a virtual tree, a real tree was planted in Rimbang Baling, Sumatra, home to one of the last populations of wild Sumatran tigers. Over the two and a half years the exhibition ran, 10,000 trees were planted. Into the Wild won a Webby Award in 2018 and four Spikes Asia Awards, recognising both its technical ambition and its model for what conservation-minded exhibition-making could be.