How Museums Use Augmented Reality: Projects and Lessons

Imagine unlocking hidden histories or revealing invisible artworks in everyday places. These are just some of the possibilities that museums are exploring with Augmented Reality, which overlays digital content onto objects and spaces both inside and beyond the museum walls.

Museums use AR to add information, animations or reconstructions to objects and spaces. The projects below show different interpretation choices, from revealing collection details to placing digital artworks beyond the gallery.

In this article, we showcase some of the most inspiring examples of Augmented Reality in museums, offering ideas that you can adapt to captivate and connect with your own audiences.

What is the difference between augmented reality and virtual reality?

While Virtual Reality (VR) immerses users in a completely digital environment, Augmented Reality (AR) overlays digital content onto the real world, usually through a smartphone. This makes it especially useful for annotating objects and providing additional layers of interpretation.

“Augmented Reality offers significant advantages for museums,” says Jim Richardson, Founder of MuseumNext. “It is more affordable to develop than Virtual Reality and relies on devices most visitors already carry, rather than costly headsets, controllers, and sensors.”

He adds, “AR also enables shared experiences in a way VR cannot. Since most museum visits are social, the ability to explore together is a major advantage.”

The cost and social experience depend on the project’s design. Phone-based AR can use devices visitors already own, while headset-based AR needs its own equipment and support. VR can also be designed for groups or accompanied by spectator screens. Compare the delivery choices in these virtual reality examples for museums.

What AR adds to museum interpretation

There are many possibilities for using AR in museums. The most straightforward way is to add explanations of pieces. This means visitors will get more information when they view exhibitions using AR. Museums could even use it to display digital versions of artists next to their work. These 3D personas can then provide narration.

AR allows adding a third dimension to displays, bringing objects or scenes to life. There are already many institutions around the world using AR. These projects bring something new to existing collections and attract wider audiences.

Here are some exciting ways that museums are using augmented reality:

de Young Museum, San Francisco

Have you ever wished you could try on the fashions you see in museum exhibitions? That’s exactly what the de Young Museum offered visitors with “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” through an innovative partnership with Snap Inc, the company behind Snapchat.

The exhibition (which opened in January 2024) used the company’s interactive try-on installation to virtually dress visitors in a choice of three evening wear ensembles—by French designer Yves Saint Laurent, Italian couturier Valentino, and Bay Area-based clothing artist Kaisik Wong.

Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle

The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris was a pioneer in its use of Augmented Reality. A project called “REVIVRE” (“To Live Again”) lets visitors come face to face with digital animals, which are now extinct in the real world.

From the beetle to the giant tortoise, the Revivre experience put visitors face to face with 3D and animated animals that appeared at their actual size.

The National Gallery

The National Gallery in London is another museum that has used augmented reality to take its collections beyond its walls with an experience that members of the public can access through their phones.

Classic paintings and modern works from artists including Titian, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Pierre Seurat and Tracey Emin appeared on London’s busy streets thanks to the Augmented Reality App.

The National Museum of Singapore

The National Museum of Singapore’s Story of the Forest was an immersive installation with a companion app. Its run ended on 13 October 2024, making it a historical example of combining a gallery installation with mobile exploration.

The exhibition focused on 69 images from the William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. These were turned into three-dimensional animations that visitors could interact with.

Visitors downloaded an Augmented Reality app and could use the camera on their phone or tablet to explore the paintings.

The family-friendly installation used technology to provide a learning experience. Like Pokémon Go, visitors could hunt for and ‘catch’ items.

In this case, these items were the plants and animals within the paintings. As they walked around the museum, they could add them to their own virtual collection. Once they had been collected, the AR app showed more information about them. Users could learn facts such as habitat, diet, and how rare the species are.

The William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings is one of the museum’s most important collections. Created by the Japanese digital art collective teamLab, the installation animated the drawings within a gallery environment.

Audiences could interact with and explore the images in an exciting new way.

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London launched Visions of Nature in October 2024, an immersive mixed-reality experience transporting visitors to the year 2125 to illustrate the impact of human actions on the planet. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft and Saola Studio, the exhibition utilizes Microsoft HoloLens 2 headsets to present interactive holographic animations of species such as cuttlefish, Darwin’s frog, and coconut crab, alongside natural wonders like the Scottish Highlands and Africa’s Great Green Wall.

A central feature of the experience is Hope, a scientific copilot guiding visitors through each scene, providing insights into the future of various ecosystems. One notable scenario depicts the emergence of ‘narlugas,’ a hybrid of narwhal and beluga whales, resulting from Arctic ice loss and subsequent crossbreeding. This narrative highlights how artificial intelligence aids in tracking and safeguarding these new species.

Visions of Nature was part of NHM’s Fixing Our Broken Planet initiative, aiming to inspire reflection on environmental impact and empower proactive change. Alex Burch, NHM’s Director of Public Programmes, emphasized that the exhibition not only offered a visually captivating journey but also delivered a powerful message about the positive influence current actions can have on the future – Read more here.

The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

The Art Gallery of Ontario worked with digital artist Alex Mayhew to create a pioneering Augmented Reality installation called ReBlink. Mayhew reimagined some of the existing pieces in the collection, allowing visitors to view them in a new light.

Visitors used their phones or tablets to see the subjects come alive and be transported to our 21st-century reality. For example, the painting Drawing Lots by George Agnew Reid depicts three characters. Their heads bend over their game together in a peaceful spot. In Mayhew’s modern version, the three are separate and absorbed in their own phone screens. Smoky traffic passes by behind. Mayhew is interested in the encroachment of technology on modern life. In his view, we are constantly bombarded by images, and as a result, we consume art at a more rapid pace.

Using AR for this project, the artist hoped to turn technology into a way to engage rather than distract. The exhibition aimed to use the app to get people to look up rather than down. According to the AGO’s Interpretive Planner, Shiralee Hudson Hill, 84% of visitors to this exhibition reported feeling engaged with the art. 39% looked at the images again after using the app.

The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, turned to AR technology to bring a new dimension to one of its oldest and most loved displays.

Many skeletons in the museum’s Bone Hall have been on show since 1881. Visitors could download an Augmented Reality app called Skin and Bone, which showed these pieces in a new light.

13 skeletons featured in the app, which superimposed images to reconstruct the creatures.

Users could see how skin and muscle would have looked over the bones and how the animals would have moved. This gave them a unique glimpse into the pieces’ history and helped to bring the display to life.

Visitors could use the app to see a vampire bat take flight or an anhinga demonstrating how it catches fish.

“This app is all about sharing some of the untold stories behind one of the museum’s most iconic collections,” said Robert Costello, the producer of the app and national outreach program manager at the Museum of Natural History.

The Pérez Art Museum, Miami

The Pérez Art Museum worked with artist Felice Grodin. Together, they created the first fully augmented reality-powered art exhibition, ‘Invasive Species‘.

In the examples above, AR adds to existing works. However, Grodin’s work for this project is entirely digital. It is intended to be a complete AR experience, conjuring images into an empty space.

The installation involved a series of digital images and species, including eerie 3D models evoking creepy crawlies, jellyfish, or cryptic signs. Felice wanted to interact with and transform the building’s architecture. The exhibition comments on the fragility of our ecosystem and the threat of climate change. It transports visitors to a future version of the building, taken over by invasive species.

For example, ‘Terrafish’ invades PAMM’s hanging gardens with a 49ft tall jellyfish-like structure. It is reminiscent of a non-native species currently populating the waters around Miami.

PAMM curator Jennifer Inacio believes that art can be a pathway to debate. She wanted the exhibition to lead to conversations, to engage viewers in a dialogue, “The uncanny works that the artist created are meant to pull viewers into the serious discussion of climate change but engagingly and interactively.”

The Kennedy Space Centre, Merritt Island

AR can help visitors to understand historical events by making them appear in 3D. The Heroes and Legends exhibit at the Kennedy Space Centre is a great example. Here, an AR experience shows a critical moment in the history of America’s space programme.

In June 1966, astronaut Gene Cernan became the second American and third person to walk in space. He later called it the ‘spacewalk from hell’. His spacesuit overheated, and he went into an uncontrollable spin, unable to see. The display shows the Gemini 9 space capsule and uses AR to project a hologram of Cernan over it. Visitors can view the ordeal as he struggles to return to the capsule. There is also a voiceover from Cernan himself, describing his experience.

The exhibition uses AR holograms throughout. This technology gives faces and voices to the people who worked on the space programme. Visitors can hear stories from NASA legends told in their own words.

Designing for shared visits

One of the concerns that PAMM had around its use of AR was the notion that technology can be isolating. Having visitors absorbed in the world on their phones and in their own bubbles would have contradicted what the artist wanted to achieve. In actual fact, it found that people were using the technology together. Groups were sharing screens and discussing what they could see. The exhibition even had the potential to engage strangers in conversation.

Another risk is that this new technology could exclude older generations. Digital natives and millennials are likely to take such installations in their stride, while older people could potentially struggle or feel left out. Again, PAMM found that this was not the case. Many of the visitors to their AR exhibition were aged 55+, and this age group reported having a positive experience.

There have been some cases of unauthorised augmentations. The most famous example is 2018 when a group of artists ‘took over’ MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Gallery. If visitors downloaded the app, they could see how these artists had reimagined the paintings. This included showing one piece as an Instagram post touting for likes. The concept is not too different to some of the examples above. But in this case, the artists did not have permission from the museum. They sought to comment on the museum’s position as’ cultural gate-keepers’.

Curators also need to ensure that AR installations don’t impact the work of other artists. PAMM was careful to only place Grodin’s works in areas of the museum that were free of existing pieces to avoid overwriting them.

Choosing devices and supporting visitors

The AGO’s ReBlink project used visitors’ phones and tablets to reinterpret paintings in the collection. Shiralee Hudson Hill, the gallery’s Interpretive Planner, reported that 84% of visitors felt engaged with the art and 39% looked at the images again after using the app. These findings belong to this exhibition. For a museum planning its own project, the useful question is how the digital layer brings attention back to the collection. The RAF Museum’s Lancaster project offers another approach: using a digital model to show parts of an aircraft visitors cannot enter.

Delivery also shapes how a story can be maintained. At the National Military Museum, Wintor’s account of designing AR stories in three dimensions describes how the team updated interpretation in response to current events.

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