While in New York earlier this month, my mom and I visited the American Museum of Natural History.
We checked out the bird and mammal dioramas, the Hall of Minerals and Hall of Gems where we admired the Star of India which is the world’s largest star sapphire, and the fossil halls where the highlight of my visit was a view of a T-Rex as first discovered on an expedition sponsored by the museum in 1902.
As impressive as the museum exhibits were, we were even more impressed by the museum’s free iPhone app.
The American Museum of Natural History Explorer app provided an incredibly easy to use directory of all the popular items on display, halls, food, shops, restaurants, and exits and it provides turn by turn directions within the museum from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. The app made it so easy for us to get from the Hall of Gems to T-Rex even though they’re at nearly opposite corners of the building.
The app also comes with several built in tours to guide you through popular exhibits. There’s a Dino tour, an Earth and Space tour, and 3 different lengths of Highlights or Night at the Museum tours. We already had a good idea of what exhibits we wanted to hit so we didn’t do any of the tours but had we not known exactly what we wanted to see, I think one of the Highlights tours would have been perfect for us.
The other fabulous thing about the museum is that they provided amazingly simple to access and reliable free wi-fi to support the use of their Explorer app.
The bar has been set high and within the next few years every world class museum is going to need an app this good.
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Love the hall of gems! That sounds like a very cool app.
One of my favorite museums in NYC! Found you through “Buzz” blog hop. So glad I did!
You’re right Carrie, they set the bar very high, and I hope other museums will follow their lead!
Now you’ve gotten the word out there, so they should get moving.
Thanks for the post!