Maritime Time-Travel Experience: a multisensory prototype for learning Singapore’s WWII maritime heritage at Nelson Bar

While we don't have data yet, we plan to present our research idea, early conceptualisations of the conceptual framework, intended data collection, and analysis. We endeavour to create a distinctive tourism product that strengthens Singapore’s attractiveness to visitors while preserving and activating a collection of national significance.</p><p dir="ltr">The flagship experience will be anchored at Nelson Bar in Sembawang.

Nelson Bar has one of the most distinctive publicly accessible non-museum collections of naval and nautical memorabilia in Singapore. It receives a steady but sporadic group of faithful patrons, dependent on the arrival of navy ships from around the world that dock at a nearby US naval base. The project will allow us to target visitors/tourists, including international WWII enthusiasts, foreign history graduate students/researchers, and even locals.

This provides an exciting opportunity to have serendipitous meetings of new visitors and patrons who are military personnel.</p><p dir="ltr">At the core of the project is the curation and interpretation of the bar’s heritage collection, including selected artefacts, ship-related memorabilia, plaques, insignia, portraits, and oral histories connected to Singapore’s naval and wartime past. Key artefacts will be digitised and integrated into a mobile-first interpretive layer that enables visitors to access stories, visual materials, and interactive content on site.

The experience will also include historically informed AI personae that allow visitors to engage in conversational encounters with wartime sailors, navymen, shipyard workers, and local voices linked to the site’s history.</p>