ArtLens Exhibition

Transitioning away from traditional touchscreen technology, ArtLens Exhibition interactives respond seamlessly to body movement using barrier-free projections. The six projections feature 14 games, in addition to an innovative gaze-tracking station that uses eye-tracking technology to show where you look at an artwork, and a facial-recognition station that captures your emotional reactions to artwork. New in June 2019, visitors can explore gesture-based 3-D-projected models of all 3-D objects installed in the gallery. Digitally turn objects around to see all angles and make new discoveries! Each individual game can be replayed using hundreds of digitized objects from across the collection. Every projection-based interactive ends with the artwork’s ID, location, and actual size so visitors understand its scale—a feature often missing in digital experiences. All of ArtLens Exhibition’s digital experiences pull content from a unified back-end platform composed of a collection catalogue management and digital asset management system. Along with custom-designed web tools, this back-end system allows CMA to update the ArtLens Exhibition experience at any time by adding more content, artwork, and games.

Gaze Tracker

Gaze Tracker encourages visitors to explore the elements and artistic choices that impact the composition of an artwork. At Gaze Tracker, visitors sit in front of an ADA-compliant monitor, wait for the interactive to calibrate with their eyes, and look at an artwork from the CMA’s collection for 15 seconds. Innovative eye-tracking technology reveals accurately where a visitor focuses when looking at the work of art, increasing the visitor’s understanding of how an artist’s compositional choices influence how they look at art. On a large video projection viewable by other visitors and on the individual monitor, the interactive shows visitors the path their eyes took while observing the work of art, including what grabbed their attention first, what detail they viewed the longest, and what elements they ignored. At the end of the interactive, visitors can see an interpretation of the artist’s compositional intent as well as the artwork’s identification, gallery location, and aggregate results from other visitors.

Express Yourself

Express Yourself is a machine-learning interactive that uses facial-recognition software to identify visitors’ emotional responses to artwork from across the CMA’s collection. To begin the interactive, visitors position themselves three feet from one of two touchscreens—one of which is ADA compliant. Next, visitors react to a large sculpture by Frank Stella featured in ArtLens Exhibition, an object that evokes strong, diverse emotional reactions. The visitor’s preliminary reactions enable the facial-recognition software to calibrate and statistics show how their initial results compare with others stored by the interactive. Visitors are then asked to react to a variety of artworks from across the CMA’s collection for 30 seconds. As visitors view each individual artwork, their facial expressions are registered as happy, surprised, confused, distasteful, fearful, or sad. When the 30 seconds are up, visitors see all their emotional reactions associated with the artworks they viewed. They can then select any artwork to begin an engaging mission that encourages deeper looking while launching them into the museum galleries to locate the artwork. Visitors can dock their iOS or Android device at Express Yourself and missions will save directly to the “You” section of ArtLens App via Bluetooth technology. Additionally, the interactive captures a video that features the visitor’s emotional reactions and images of the artworks that saves directly to the device’s camera roll.