Britain's Science Museum brings artifacts to life in iPad app

LONDON, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- Britain's Science Museum says visitors can interact with 80 of its most precious artifacts, using an iPad app to study, rotate and operate them.

The Journeys of Invention app will include artifacts hand-picked by museum curators, and will allow visitors to examine a flea using Robert Hooke's 17th century microscope, encode messages using a German Enigma machine from World War II, and tour of the control panel of the Apollo 10 command module -- an area not normally accessible for museum visitors to explore.

The app will display photographs, archive film footage and contemporary artworks, museum officials said.

"Journeys of Invention is at once awe-inspiring and intimate," Science Museum lead curator Andrew Nahum told The Guardian. "It is like having a curator take you on a series of guided tours through some of the most magnificent objects in our collection, with each journey bringing to life the story of a key scientific idea."

The 80 inventions are collected into 14 stories, two of which are included free when the app is downloaded; the others can be accessed by a single in-app purchase of $11.

London developer Touch Press created the app in partnership with the Science Museum.