Not content with a refurbished building that makes them the largest contemporary art museum in America, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is courting patrons with interactive technology that enhances and even transforms the viewing experience.

Visitors are invited to navigate the vast 170,000 square feet of indoor/outdoor exhibition space via a new iOS app (also available on Android in phase 2) that provides immersive touring with location-aware audio navigation—a distinct upgrade over the guided-tour audio tapes, which directed patrons where to go, instead of the other way ‘round.

Museum visitors get to choose their own narrators, too. Featured speakers include high-wire walker Philippe Petit, and Bay Area sports personalities, including members of the San Francisco Giants organization, and roller-derby player Suzy Hotrod.

More than that, the tour continues out past the museum walls, offering narratives for the surrounding South of Market (SoMA) neighborhood. All this is in addition to two new large-scale Story Screens that offer glimpses of activity typically behind the scenes, and an activity-based and self-directed Photography Interpretive Gallery and interactive spaces in the painting and sculpture galleries.

Financed with generous grant funding from the Bloomberg Philanthropies, which seeks to empower artists and cultural organizations, the new app was developed by SFMOMA in partnership with the SF-based tech startup, Detour, with additional support from Adobe, Antenna International, Belle & Wissell, and video producers 32K Productions.

Article sponsored by SFMOMA