Tech x Heritage Conference: Reimagining Memory, Place & Participation
We were delighted to be invited to the ‘Tech x Heritage’ conference organized by the Singapore Heritage Society in collaboration with the National Heritage Board on Saturday 4 July.
The conference was hosted at the Nanyang Polytechnic School of Design & Media (NYP) and featured fascinating talks about ethics in heritage tech, heritage digitisation, education and accessibility, and future use cases of AI. Advancements in heritage tech is a topic we are following closely here at History Ink, as our upcoming article on Digital Storytelling will explore.
Colonial imagery of hawkers in Singapore, courtesy of Hawker History StoryMap
Introducing 3D modelling of heritage buildings in Singapore by NHB
The conference included talks from those working at the forefront of the discipline. Dr Bryan Wee, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, shared the Hawker History StoryMap, a website which explores Singapore's hawker heritage through digital archives and interactive geography through the National Library Board’s Curiocity Hawkerscapes initiative. Historian Dr. John van Wyhe introduced Darwin Online and Wallace Online – two longstanding digital scholarly web projects which provide the world's largest collections of the complete publications, manuscripts, and private papers of evolutionary theorists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
Digitisation of 3D object at NYP’s Heritage Digitisation Studio
We were also treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of the NYP’s Heritage Digitisation Studio, led by Senior Lecturer Zoltan Poyagani and 3D Real Time and VR Specialist Jacques Frety. The studio runs real-world documentation projects in collaboration with Singapore’s National Heritage Board, with specialisations in photogrammetry, custom-built capture rigs and 3D Gaussian Splatting. Another highlight was a sneak peak inside the NYP’s new BeyondReality Studio. Recently unveiled in 2025, the studio is Singapore's first 3-in-1 facility combining motion capture, curved green screens, and LED volume virtual production under one roof.
The new NYP BeyondReality Studio
