Looking at a picture of art in a book pales in comparison to viewing the original in person. But viewing art in person doesn’t tell the viewer the backstory or the artists’ intention, like a book could.

Attendees of the exhibit “Keith Haring: The Political Line” at the de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, however, got to experience both simultaneously.

If attendees owned Google Glass, the museum offered visitors an experience tailored to them on the wearable device as they strolled through the exhibit about Haring, an artist who created public pieces in places such as the New York City subway and Time Square about New York City street culture in the 1980s. Google Glass is a wearable device that puts a computer into eyeglass frames along with a display that allows the wearer to view web content.

Walking through the exhibit with Google Glass gave visitors additional information about the art with a visual aid, such as a video, without having to read or look down at a piece of paper, says Blaire Moskowitz, marketing director for Antenna International, which helped create the content for the exhibit.

Beacons enabled the visual aids. As visitors walked through the exhibit, the beacons, small pieces of hardware that use Bluetooth Low Energy wireless networking to track the location of the Google Glass, could sense where visitors were in the museum, and push relevant information about the art they were near. For example, one of the exhibit’s beacons would communicate with Google Glass and ask visitors if they wanted to watch a CBS news segment about the specific piece they were looking at. Once they confirmed yes via the touchpad on the side of the glasses, they could see the news segment and watch Haring create the graffiti work in the subway in their line of sight, while seeing the finished product next to it in the museum.

“You are really part of the action, as it stops where you are looking at the resulting artwork,” Moskowitz says. “You are really immersed in the actions of the event, in the same moment you are faced with the evidence.”

Antenna International, which creates the audio tours for the museum, approached de Young about experimenting with a Google Glass tour platform and produced the product for free. This was the first project from Antenna that used Google Glass in a museum. Antenna created the content and partnered with GuidiGO Studio, which produces guided tours for smartphone apps and wearables, to create the app to run on Google Glass. Including planning, it took five months to create.

The exhibit, which ran for several weeks earlier this year, used 17 beacons. Visitors had to confirm they wanted to interact with each push notification sent by the Google Glass app before the interaction would start. Because many of Haring’s displayed works were large with plenty of details, the glasses helped focus attention on one area of a painting and explained more about it.

The experience, however, was open only to Google Glass owners, so only a small number of attendees got the enhanced experience. The museum did not share an exact number. If an attendee who had Google Glass came with a guest, the museum had extra Google Glasses to lend to those visitors, so both guests could experience the exhibit with Google Glass.

Overall, the museum was happy to test the technology and offer the experience to visitors, a spokesman says. The exhibit was a separate fee for attendees, but visitors using Google Glass did not pay extra for the Google Glass guided tour.

The museum experienced a few kinks with the platform, such as getting the right beacons to trigger at the right time, and Google Glass interrupting the experience with time and weather alerts, the spokesman says.

Although Google Glass is no longer on the market, Antenna plans to explore using other wearables for museum tours in the future. Wearable devices are not going away, as 34% consumer say they want a wearable device to make life easier, according to a survey of 1,021 U.S. consumers released in May 2015 by PowerReviews, a consumer review software company.

 

Follow mobile business journalist April Dahlquist, associate editor, mobile, at Mobile Strategies 360, @Mobile360April

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