Flora

Flora is one of the multi-touch apps at the Presentation and Education Centre Tikveš, in Kopački Rit Nature Park. It runs on a 60-inch touch table and covers the park's plants, animals and natural phenomena, with a few dozen entries written by the museum's staff, in Croatian and English.

The design borrows from old naturalist notebooks: pinned paper notes, hand-drawn maps of the Danube and the marshes, a magnifying glass, a coffee ring. Visitors spread the notes out and open them to read about the wetland's 553 recorded plant taxa, or the "water filigree" that forms where the muddy Danube meets the dark marsh water.

Try the demo

Flora is a web app, built with React and packaged with Electron, running on a Windows touch PC. Up to five people can use it at once, and that's where the hard part was:

• Browsers on Windows have multi-touch bugs of their own, some of them subtle and platform-specific.
• The app has to work out which fingers belong to which gesture while several people drag, pinch and tap at the same time.
• The layout has to make sense from every side of the table, for strangers who are all reaching in at once.

The same foundation runs Prince Đorđe, its sister app at Tikveš.

Opening a note is the app's signature moment. A drop of ink lands and spreads into the paper with an uneven, fibrous edge and a darker wet rim, then dries from the edge inwards, leaving a faint sepia stain. The text appears where the ink has dried, as if it were just written. A single WebGL renderer draws every note, so several people can open notes at once without slowing the table down.