Facebook created AR experience for one of London Tate Museum’s wings

In partnership with London Tate museum, Facebook launched the project “The Virtual Wing: Powered By Spark AR.” This project was created to tell new and unknown stories about famous works of art in an interactive way, through visitors’ smartphones.

To see unique AR content that reveals interesting stories about paintings a user needs to open a camera on Instagram (available both for iOS and Android) and point at one of the exhibited paintings. The AR tech will do the rest: will tell the story about the author of the painting and several interesting facts about how a painting was created.

For example, when looking at one of Joseph Mallord William’s paintings “Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide Setting In” through Insta-camera, a user could see how the painting is literally torn apart. This effect follows the legend that William has previously torn the canvas to five pieces so that his seven cats could walk through it like through a cat flap.

In this way, this interactive wing in Tate offers a unique opportunity for everyone to see the world-famous painting from a new perspective, completely free.