Exploria, Mandai Wildlife Reserve, Singapore

• Case Studies

The Mandai Wildlife Reserve is a unique wildlife and nature destination in Singapore, home to world-renowned wildlife parks such as Singapore Zoo, River Wonders, Night Safari, Bird Paradise, and Rainforest Wild Adventure.

Exploria, the newest indoor attraction at the Mandai Wildlife Reserve, is an entirely different kind of wildlife encounter. A sprawling 10,000 sq m indoor multimedia world, it takes visitors on immersive digital expeditions to ecosystems that are typically unreachable, from prehistoric eras to extreme Arctic and desert environments, microscopic ecosystems, deep ocean depths, and more.

Mandai Wildlife Group, together with experience designer GSM Project, Electronics & Engineering (E&E), and BOB D&B, translated a bold creative vision into one of Southeast Asia’s largest indoor, nature-themed multimedia attractions.

The philosophy driving the project was ‘content first, technology second’, and this approach shaped every decision. The creative concept for Exploria was originated by GSM Project, who won the design tender. E&E came on board roughly five years before opening, tasked with translating GSM’s spatial and narrative vision into a functional technical marvel that could deliver the requisite immersive experience.

John Tan, project director at E&E, said: “In our industry we still start a project talking about hardware. But you must focus on what the experience will be. What is the content? What is the audio that will be heard? What is the video that will be displayed? Content should guide the design and deployment of the technology solution for the space. The hardware comes last.”

With all parties aligned, content dictated the progression of the project. Over a period of three and a half years, the content went through multiple review cycles with Mandai Wildlife Group. It was also shared with E&E and its availability meant that technical delivery could be curated with content as the central driving force.

The visitor journey

The visitor journey at Exploria is centred around immersion and engagement. Core to achieving these two experiential outcomes is the use of RFID wristbands that form the anchor of the visitor journey.

Visitors receive their RFID wristbands at kiosks in the entrance lobby, processed through SATO CT4-LX printers and scanned via barcode readers.

From there, a network of over 220 RFID readers, ranging from compact antenna-only units to full housings with embedded speakers and LED indicators, build a personalised thread for the visitor that guides them through the entire experience.

Visitors begin their journey at Our Interconnected World, the central atrium of Exploria where Elo touchscreens display user profiles and scores, creating a discover and collect mechanic that is particularly compelling for younger visitors. There is also a gamification layer adding another dimension to the experience.

Connected to Our Interconnected World are five themed worlds: Realm of the Giants, Bitdeer AI Extreme Frontiers, Infinite Wonderland, Micro Worlds, and World of Darkness. Each world is a distinct immersive environment, with its own technology ecosystem, interactivity logic, and content narrative.

Connecting all these spaces is the RFID wristband system that allows visitors to unlock personalised content at dedicated stations throughout the attraction. Our Interconnected World itself is anchored by a large spherical LED globe, a feature that is fast becoming a hallmark of E&E’s repertoire. The visual centrepiece was a final addition to the space. At Exploria, Unilumin and Leyard LED tiles have been used for the LED wall at the entrance and the LED Globe. These are driven by a Novastar and Mooncell LED processor respectively and a high-specification Dell workstation driving the content output.

Realm of the Giants

Upon entering Realm of the Giants, visitors are transported on a journey through four prehistoric eras to the present day, exploring some of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth, the devastation of mass extinctions that shaped life on Earth today, and the dawn of the present day.

Engaging and immersing the visitors in this narrative is The Giants Show, a fully immersive theatrical environment. The show begins with visitors stepping onto a platform inside a cylindrical shaft. The platform, which was also installed and commissioned by E&E, ascends to a 360-degree visual environment that traces the growth and extinction of colossal creatures, enhanced by motion, mist, and other special effects. The projection system for the show comprises 22 Panasonic 4K laser projectors, each outputting 12,000 lumens, driven by disguise media servers.

This was E&E’s first major deployment of disguise, a choice driven by the sheer processing demands of the show’s large-format, multi-surface content.

Ensuring that the projection displays content with pinpoint accuracy was a challenge. The team began with a manual alignment approach, with a disguise engineer on-site alongside E&E’s own technicians, but misalignment and edge-blending inconsistencies led to a rethink. The solution was Omnical, an automated camera-based calibration platform, which resolved the alignment issues and mapped the content perfectly to the projection surface.

The show environment also presented physical challenges. Mist effects are used throughout the Realm of the Giants space to heighten the atmosphere, and projecting through mist, even intermittently, raised concerns about lens contamination and humidity. E&E worked with Panasonic to establish a regular maintenance schedule for projectors and lens cleaning, which has proved sufficient to maintain hardware and image quality in operations.

Timecode synchronisation was a critical element. Medialon Showmaster Pro acts as the master show controller, sending timecodes via a timecode distributor to the disguise media servers and the Q-SYS Core 610 DSP, which handles all audio playback.

With disguise and Q-SYS both working off Medialon’s timecode output, lighting cues, programmed in advance against a preview of the video, fire as macros, ensuring that projections, audio and lighting effects are perfectly aligned from the first frame.

Richard Dsouza, assistant manager, systems, at E&E, says: “Disguise does most of the heavy lifting for the job, which is mapping the content playout as per timecode. Medialon fires off timecode and the video and audio are in sync, following timecode.” The audio system for the show comprises two Crown eight-channel amplifiers driving 16 JBL weatherised loudspeakers arranged around the perimeter of the show space, supported by a JBL dual 18-in subwoofer powered by a Crown and four Extron amplifiers feeding the Aura bass shakers distributed across the water basin. The Aura bass shaker tactile transducer ensures that the rumble of prehistoric giants is felt as much as heard. The intention of the bass shakers was to create vibrations on water.

Flux’s SPAT Revolution spatial audio engine is integrated into the signal chain, adding a further dimension of three-dimensional audio spatialisation to the experience. Audio was mixed in Flux and speaker outputs printed from Flux. There is no “live” flux mixing in the signal chain. Bitdeer AI Extreme Frontiers Bitdeer AI Extreme Frontiers highlights four different challenging environments – the arid desert, icy Arctic, high altitude, and the modern city. Each interactive zone is enclosed by floor-to-ceiling screens that respond to visitor movement, triggering real-world footage of wildlife adapting to extreme conditions.

The Panasonic projectors in the Arctic space units in the desert environment are selected not only for image quality but for the reliability and low maintenance requirements in extreme climatic conditions of both heat and cold.

E&E addressed the environmental risks through careful physical design. In the Arctic simulator, projectors are mounted above a catwalk that is effectively exposed to ambient temperatures outside the conditioned space, keeping the hardware naturally cooled. For the desert environment, an initial design with enclosed glass panels over the projection lens openings was later revised. Dust accumulation on the glass was causing image degradation, and upon inspection the engineers found the catwalk environment above was already sufficiently cool.

Interactivity in Bitdeer AI Extreme Frontiers is driven by Orbbec Femto Mega depth cameras, which detect visitor presence and body position, feeding data into Unity-based interactive applications running on high-specification Dell workstations.

As a visitor approaches a projection surface, their movement triggers responsive content.

Madmapper is used throughout for projection mapping output, providing the interactive software layer. Interactivity is driven by a custom software translating depth and tracking information from the Orbbec cameras to movement in Unity.

The Aura bass shakers, driven by a dedicated mono channel from the interactive application, provide the haptic sensation that is directly synchronised with the audio content and lighting effects within City simulator.

Micro Worlds

The centrepiece installations in Micro Worlds are three projection domes, housing plankton, ant colonies, and bee encounters – enabling guests to activate responses and experience these microscopic worlds as if they had shrunk to the size of these small but essential life forms. Each display is driven by a Panasonic projector fitted with a fisheye conversion lens. The dome structures themselves were fabricated in six fibreglass sections by a specialist contractor, assembled and finished on-site before E&E integrated the projection hardware.

Dsouza notes: “The domes look complicated because of the spherical nature of the surface. Madmapper was used to accurately map the projection surface. The fisheye lens was used to project the hemispherical image.”

Each dome is paired with a decorative ball which is mounted touching the Storm Interface trackball controller, allowing visitors to physically steer the microscopic world they are exploring.

Audio for the domes is handled by JBL surface-mount satellite speakers and Control 50S/T subwoofers.

Alongside the domes, interactive orbs and wall-mounted projection installations use Panasonic PT-REQ10LB projectors with Orbbec Femto Bolt depth cameras to create body-tracking responsive experiences. Madmapper again handles the projection mapping output.

World of Darkness

World of Darkness is the most sensor-intensive environment in Exploria, inviting visitors into environments where light is scarce to discover how animals such as lesser horseshoe bats, cave cockroaches, Cuban boas, orb-weaving cave spiders, New Zealand glowworms, and Mexican blind cavefish perceive their surroundings.

Visitor presence is tracked by multiple Hotron motion sensors, positioned with careful attention to detection zones. Each sensor connects to the Advantech ADAM I/O modules monitored by the Medialon show control system, which triggers reactive lighting or sound response in certain zones. Dsouza notes: “We had to ensure the detection zones do not overlap. When a visitor enters the detection zone, it activates a reactive light or plays a sound, or a story plays on the screen.”

The Cuban Boa installation adds a further sensory dimension with a Flir thermal camera, which detects body heat and informs the interactive system of visitor position even in very low ambient light. As the Flir is unable to detect visitors, the visitor presence to the interactive (unity) is done via a Hortron motion sensor.

Floor projections in the Cuban Boa area use Panasonic projectors and the surface is mapped using Madmapper, while Orbbec Femto Bolt cameras track visitor movement for the floor-based interactive content.

The New Zealand glowworm installation uses a Panasonic projector with an ultra-short throw lens to project a bioluminescent effect, with Orbbec Femto Mega cameras providing the interactive detection layer.

The Mexican blind cavefish installation features a three-projector tactile table display with Hokuyo sensors for precise hand positional tracking, creating a responsive aquatic simulation that reacts to hand movement around the installation table.

Weird and Wonderful, a section within World of Darkness, features 14 individual creature stations. Each station runs on its own Dell workstation, with Hotron motion sensors to detect visitor presence and activate the RFID readers and K-array subwoofers providing localised low-frequency reinforcement with JBL speakers. Four of these stations use Orbbec cameras to activate visitor presence as well as allow body tracking to integrate with the gamification layer.

Infinite Wonderland

Infinite Wonderland explores the rich biodiversity of rainforests and coral reefs. The Sounds of the Forest installation within this world is one of the most spatially sophisticated audio deployments at Exploria. A total of 16 Q-SYS in-ceiling speakers create a distributed listening environment that shifts in character across zones, supported by three Panasonic projectors and three Samsung 86-in displays delivering the interconnected tree interactivity.

The Coral Reef installation, which sits within Infinite Wonderland, features seven Samsung 85-in displays arranged around a reef-like environment, each serving a different creature encounter from mimic octopus and sharks to mantis shrimp and cleaner fish.

Orbbec Femto Bolt cameras handle interactive detection at five stations, with Hotron motion sensors covering the remaining two. An Aura bass shaker is integrated at the Mantis Shrimp station specifically, giving visitors a physical sensation of the pistol-shrimp-like strike.

The Coral Reef also uses Orbbec depth cameras in combination with interactive applications with E&E conducting extensive testing of the camera-sensor integration to validate detection reliability before installation.

Masterful control

With the expansive scale and scope of the technological deployment, the show control setup at Exploria is critical for operations and show syncronization.

Across all five worlds, show control is handled by Medialon Showmaster Pro units, one per world. Each manages the triggers, timecodes, and device commands for everything within its zone. The reliability of Medialon led to its selection. Exploria operates every day of the year and there is no room for any error.

Audio processing throughout the attraction is handled by Q-SYS, with Core 110f units covering Our Interconnected World and Realm of the Giants, and Core 610 processors deployed in The Giants Show, Micro Worlds, Infinite Wonderland, Bitdeer AI Extreme Frontiers, and World of Darkness. Crown amplifiers handle the high-output soundscape and show audio requirements; Extron NetPA amplifiers are used for more localised interactive audio where their compact four-channel format is better suited to the task.

The IT backbone underpinning the entire system comprises Netgear managed switches throughout, with a Dell PowerEdge server cluster and ME5024 SAN storage array in the back-of-house server room.

Three Dell production servers running VMware host the centralised services that manage RFID server data, visitor profile information and scoring system. A pair of Fortigate 401F firewalls provide network security, with an advanced threat protection bundle in place for the guest-facing network segments.

To manage the extensive deployment, work was executed in phases. Much of the pre-configuration, including IP addressing, switch port VLAN assignments, and offline unity app testing was completed offline before the spaces were fully built out. This allowed E&E team to move rapidly to integration and testing once the physical fit-out was complete.

Future now

Exploria represents a modern attraction where content is central to the experience. Executing the technology systems required to bring Exploria to life not only required the integrator to be at the top of its game but also necessitated evolution.

Content development for the attraction ran for three and half years, with review sessions involving the client at regular intervals. E&E had a separate team, Broadcast Professional, under their group of companies that was ever present at all of these production sessions with Mandai Wildlife Group and GSM, and being involved in them allowed E&E collectively to grasp how content and hardware must come together to create the desired experience.

Tan is emphatic on the lesson Exploria has taught him about the future of experiential integration. He says: “The question for us was how to make Exploria come alive. The experience had to be able to engage everyone, from a three year- old to a 70-year-old. That thought process drove everything about how we designed the interactivity and how we looked at creating immersion.”

The broadened scope of involvement E&E experienced during the Exploria project is one that Tan sees as the natural direction of travel for the industry. He reflects: “The best lesson from this project is knowing the story from day one. When you understand the story, then at the end of the design, the AV follows. That helps the client and the designer fulfil their vision.”

With infrastructure designed for longevity, Tan notes that the hardware foundation needs to support 10 to 20 years of operation, even as content refreshes on a three-to-five-year cycle, the work delivered at Exploria showcases a substantial commitment to futureproofing. The platform is already designed to accommodate content enhancements beyond the current opening programme.

Tan concludes: “What truly sets this project apart is not just its scale, but the depth of expertise and collaboration required to bring it to life. Backed by decades of experience in the professional AV and systems integration industry, E&E was able to draw on its proven technical capabilities while simultaneously pushing into new frontiers of immersive visitor engagement. From complex multimedia integration to the implementation of RFID-driven interactive systems, gamification elements and dynamic storytelling experiences, the project demanded a seamless balance between engineering precision and creative innovation. E&E worked closely alongside a diverse network of international specialists, creative teams, consultants and technology partners to deliver a fully integrated experience that meets world-class standards. E&E’s systems specialists and project management teams emphasised the strong sense of collaboration and unity that defined the Exploria project from start to finish.

“They shared that projects of this scale and complexity are rare opportunities; ones that challenge teams to grow, innovate and achieve new milestones together. The successful delivery of Exploria was made possible through the close camaraderie between clients, consultants, technology partners and the E&E team together with all their vendors, all working towards a shared vision. The project stands as a testament to what can be achieved when expertise, trust and collaboration come together in pursuit of excellence.

“The project stands as a reflection of how the company continues to evolve, embracing new technologies, expanding its creative capabilities and delivering experiential environments that go far beyond traditional AV integration. The completion of this landmark development marks not only a significant milestone for the project team, but also another defining chapter in E&E’s continued journey of innovation and excellence,” says Tan.

Image: Mandai Wildlife Group