Press

Anyone with an Apple Watch [is] able to go through the museum and hear recordings about the nearest display when alerted by a vibration on their wrist.

Audio tours aren't new, but they typically involve renting a bulky museum headset and punching in numbers or following a set tour. Advances in location-aware smartphone technology mean an app can now pinpoint exactly where a person is inside a museum.

Museum curators lent their voices to the app, chatting about their personal favorites, and visitors both off-site and on also can enjoy music and deep-dive content about selected artworks.

An interactive 3D map, powered with indoor positioning technology, helps users navigate through the galleries...

The analytics payoff to the museum is considerable. The Guidekick technology, whether running on the visitor's phone or Watch, can see which exhibit items are getting the most traffic and attention, for example.

Data like that could influence the way the museum organizes the pieces in an exhibit.

The new experience, which is powered by app developer Guidekick, lets visitors explore the museum’s galleries and exhibits with their Watch.

Once downloaded to the phone, the app allows visitors to choose between five tours including the new special exhibition, Oscar de la Renta: The Retrospective.

You’ve got the handy-dandy foldout map that’s supposed to guide you to that painting you fell in love with the last time. But you can’t find it anywhere in the labyrinth — where’s your GPS?

Just like GPS, only indoors, it’s the first app to use Apple’s indoor positioning with core location technology. [ . . . ] Bye-bye to audio tours with their clunky shoulder sets and headphones. No more confusing 2-D maps and brochures. This is elegant, unobtrusive.

If you imagine that acting director Richard Benefield is actually standing in front of David Hockney’s Seven Yorkshire Landscapes as he talks about the video you see on the flat-screen monitors, that’s because he is—or rather he was at the time of recording.

In addition to the VIP feeling that comes with a tour of the museum guided by its top talent, the app provides an interactive 3D map to help you find your way around.

They wanted to be “teleported back in time,” Paddon says, in order to better understand the site’s history. There could be an app for that, they decided – and they could create it.

So they returned to their Bay Area base and began an experiment in teleportation.