Art + Tech · Art + Tech · 3 min read
What Is Augmented Reality Art, Actually? A (Short) History
From audio guides to phones that turn murals into movies — AR art has been sneaking up on us for 70 years.
September 4, 2026
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Augmented reality sounds futuristic, but museums have been "augmenting" the way we see art for a surprisingly long time. Back in 1952, Stedelijk Museum director Willem Sandberg pioneered the world's first museum audio tour, broadcasting pre-recorded lectures over closed-circuit shortwave radio — a low-tech way of layering extra information onto a static object.
The term "augmented reality" as we use it now — content layered onto a live camera view through a phone or headset — really took off with smartphones in the 2010s. Suddenly you didn't need a headset lab; you just needed the phone already in your pocket.
Museums jumped in early
By the early 2010s, museums across Europe were already experimenting. Historic sites like Cluny Abbey in France and the Reichstag in Germany used AR to reconstruct what buildings looked like centuries ago, and museums such as the Sukiennice Museum in Kraków began layering interpretive AR content onto exhibitions.
The wall doesn't move. Everything else can.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Media Lab ran a project called "Metaverses" in 2014, pairing four MFA students with senior artists from a longtime New York artist residency to build an augmented-reality tour layered over parts of the Met's collection. And at the 2011 Venice and Istanbul Biennials, the artist group Manifest.AR used geolocated AR to place virtual artworks inside exhibition spaces that had denied them official entry — a genuinely rebellious use of the tech, since curators couldn't remove or block a piece of art that only existed as a phone overlay.
From museum lobbies to city streets
What's changed most since those early experiments isn't the concept — it's the barrier to entry. Early museum AR often required special apps, markers, or even printed cards. Today's browser-based AR (WebAR) needs nothing installed at all, which is exactly the shift that lets something like a mural on a city wall become an AR experience anyone can trigger just by opening a link and tapping their camera.
Make the walls move
On a Vivia Art piece, one tap of the shutter plays the artist's own animation right on the real wall. Your free Art Passport saves every piece you find.
