Amazing new interactive tool lets you explore the Royal Ontario Museum like never before

Wandering around the Royal Ontario Museum is a great way to spend the day, checking out all the ancient artifacts, dinosaur and animal specimens, and incredible rocks and gemstones on display (just to name a few). The only thing that would make it better is if you could interact with all of the objects, and whereas you couldn't do that before, now, with a new system called ScopifyROM, you can!

ScopifyROM is a new way to interact with museum galleries and exhibits. With your smartphone or tablet and the Scopify app, you gain access to different visual tools that let you explore the objects on display in a way that used to only be available to the museum curators. Translate the hieroglyphics on a mummy's sarcophagus, see what an X-ray view of the inside looks like, and even what the mummy looked like when he or she was alive. Zoom in on the microscopic structure of a meteorite, rotate it 360 degrees to see from all sides, and get an animated movie showing what the meteorite looked like as it plummeted through our atmosphere.

Each tool in the application not only gives you spectacular new ways to see the exhibit pieces, but with the press of a button, they also provides new, in-depth knowledge about what you're seeing. So, you not only see how the diamonds of a beautifully-crafted broach fluoresce different colours under ultraviolet light, but you also learn why it happens and what the colours mean. Zoom in to see the atomic structure of the diamonds and at each level of the zoom, more information becomes available.

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There are only a limited number of objects in the museum that are programmed into ScopifyROM at the moment and the application itself will lead you right to them. However, the tool holds such promise, and with so much information available about the amazing objects in the museum, the system can only expand from here.

This new way to interact with the museum is a great way for kids and teenagers to get more involved with what they're seeing, which really enhances what they learn from the experience, but adults will love it too. Get out to the ROM soon and try it out!

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