From Jan Rothuizen’s AR(t) exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum.

A healthy number of museum-related layers already exist on the Layar platform. The Andy Warhol Museum layer displays important Warhol points around the city of Pittsburgh, Jan Rothuizen’s ARtours layer augments the Stedelijk Museum here in Amsterdam and Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s “uninvited” exhibition is on display at MoMa in New York City.

While most of our early adopters have focused on art museums, AR has a massive amount of potential for all types of museums.

If you’re not yet convinced, take it up with Paul Stork and Ebelien Pondaag of  Fabrique, members of the Layar Partner Network. The pair is presenting a paper titled Augmented Reality and the Museum Experience (which you can read here) and is hosting a workshop this week in Philadelphia at the Museums and the Web 2011 conference.

We’ll post Fabrique’s presentation slides later this week, so keep an eye out.

On Saturday October 9th, the physical space inside the MoMA building in New York will host a virtual exhibition, based on Augmented Reality technology. The show will not be visible to regular visitors of the MoMA, but those using the “Layar Augmented Reality browser” on their iPhone or Android smartphones, will see numerous additional works on each of the floors.

The experimental unofficial exhibition is part of the Conflux Festival, the annual New York festival dedicated to the psychogeography practice. With the exhibition, the organisers of the event aim to address a contemporary issue, caused by the rapid rise of Augmented Reality usage. What is the impact of AR on our public and private spaces? Is the distinction between the two fading, or are we approaching a situation with an increasing fragmentation of space and realities to be perceived individually?

The exhibition is organised by Sander Veenhof, augmented reality experimentalist from the Netherlands, and the New York based new media artist Mark Skwarek. Both artists share a common fascination for hybrid collaborations between virtual and physical entities.

Augmented reality artists worldwide were invited to showcase their work in the MoMA. Sander & Mark curated the exhibition. By the way, the MoMA is not involved in this yet. But that’s not a requirement anymore anno 2010, being independent and working in augmented reality.

Event: DIY Augmented Reality exhibition - MoMA, New York
Opening: 4PM October 9th 2010
Location: MoMA, NY - floors 1 to 6 + virtual floors 7 & 8 + garden
Required: iPhone or Android device
Developers:  Sander Veenhof & Mark Skwarek
More info about the festival: confluxfestival.org
About the exhibition: sndrv.nl/moma