At the Detroit Institute of Arts, visitors can get an X-ray view of the skeletal remains of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy or walk through the gates of ancient Babylon through a section of wall from the Ishtar Gate.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art, children and adults use the motion of their bodies to explore the great masterpieces of the past or create a self-portrait on a screen using watercolors or chalk.

At the Toledo Museum of Art, families can follow clues in a scavenger hunt that leads them to the animal that escaped from an art piece or take a virtual tour of a current exhibition.

All of the institutions are catapulting into the digital age, keeping up with technological trends and inviting guests to connect with art in a new way.

“This is how we can break down the physical barriers of the museum,” said Jennifer Czajkowski, vice president of learning and audience engagement at the DIA, about the museum’s augmented reality mobile tour launched to the public last week. “We can have visitors, through their imaginations, take objects out of cases and manipulate them. We can have visitors walk through the physical context of original works of art in a way we could never do without this technology.

“It’s another vehicle, another tool we can use to help visitors find personal meaning in art.”

VIDEO: An app-enhanced visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts  

The technology

The DIA uses Google’s Tango technology to create a tour over provided Android phones that users take with them through the museum. The museum partnered with Google and the mobile developer GuidiGO to create the augmented reality program, letting users view digital objects in the real world.

For example: Click on the icon of an early 20th century royal presentation bowl from Africa, and you can watch the process the sculptor, Yoruba artist Olowe of Ise, probably used to carve the intricate bowl out of a tree stump. Scan a carved limestone relief from an Assyrian palace, and you can see the original pigments bedecked on the king and his subjects before time wore much of the colors away.

The program cost about $200,000, said Megan DiRienzo, DIA interpretive planner, and was funded by a donation from the Bartuch Family Foundation. The tour opened last week on the first floor but will be expanded to the museum’s second floor by early summer, where murals, including the Detroit Industry frescoes by artist Diego Rivera, will feature virtual enhancements, she said.

GuidiGO developed the program AR Composer, which uses a large smart phone to position virtual objects in view for the user. The objects can move. They can change. They can walk you through a world that wasn’t physically there moments ago. And they can make noise.

David Lerman, GuidiGO’s founder, said the new program the company started developing a few years ago for museums has been tested through prototypes at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona and about six other locations around the world, but the DIA project is the first one the mobile development company has put in visitors’ hands.

“It’s a game changer for connecting people with their museum in a new and amazing way,” Lerman said.

The Toledo Museum of Art partnered with the company OnCell, a storytelling platform, to put together its free, interactive app, TMApp, which works with visitors’ smart phones. The museum launched the virtual program over the holidays during its annual Great Art Escape.

The scavenger hunt has 14 steps that take visitors all over the museum to try to catch an animal that has escaped from its spot on an art piece and is causing chaos throughout the institution, said Maria Iafelice, the museum’s docent program manager and the project manager for the new app.

A second program on the app guides users to different parts of the museum to see the art pieces that inspired poet Paul Durcan’s writings in his book Wild, Wild Erie. Once a user finds one of the pieces, he or she can listen to a reading of the corresponding poem by Durcan.

A mobile guide is being added for the upcoming exhibition Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, which opens Feb. 10 at TMA. The guide includes video interviews with Wiley, audio, comparative images, a music playlist, and audio descriptions of a selection of works for those with vision impairment. The museum still plans to add more settings for those with visual impairment and multi-lingual components.

The museum of the future, one that integrates technology with art, is happening everywhere. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum are also experimenting with augmented reality and other emerging technologies, such as iBeacon, according to digitaltrends.com.

The Louvre in Paris worked with Nintendo to create its audio tour, which provides 3D photos, mapping, and other content on a Nintendo 3DS XL that visitors can carry around the institution.

Drawing in the next generation

The Stubblefield family of Stryker, Ohio, checked into the Toledo museum over the holidays to check out its new app.

The family of five — parents Sarah and Jason, and kids Jacob, 14, Cordelia, 11, and Callie, 8 — participated in June in a scavenger hunt on a temporary app the museum created as part of activities during its summer block party. After taking selfies with a guest wearing a Mud Hens shirt, tracking down the choir performing on the lawn, and imitating on Monroe Street the famous cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, they made it to 11th place in the hunt.

“We were all over the place, and it was a lot of fun,” said Sarah Stubblefield. “I saw the [new] app and checked it out and saw there was another scavenger hunt, and [the kids] have been excited to try it.”

It was OK with this mom of three that a cell phone has been involved in recent museum visits.

“It interests them and it draws them back in,” she said. “When I was a child, I was excited just to go on all the walking tours and other programs. But they are a different generation, and so I think the technology really speaks to them.”

Eliminating the often daunting facade of a museum is important, said Jane Alexander, chief information/​digital officer at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Gallery One, which opened in late 2012, offers museumgoers a first look at the museum’s collection on a Collection Wall, an interactive facade that transitions every 40 seconds and groups artwork by theme and type, and through Studio Play, an interactive space that was updated in June. The technological enhancements include a 25-foot digital display that focuses in on an artwork based on a user’s movements. Visitors create self-portraits, personal works of art, and mimic the stance of classic sculptures. ArtLens, the museum’s cell phone app, connects users to every gallery — and every piece in the museum.

“We believe that art museums are for everyone, and this is about taking away the intimidation,” Alexander said. “People thought museums weren’t for families — no talking, no moving, no running. So we created Gallery One to attract audiences to entertain and engage in our collection through activities that are not only magical but brought you into our collection and that you could personalize.”

Alexander said attendance by families to the museum has increased by 29 percent since the interactive gallery was created and that the Cleveland museum has been a case study for the successful synthesis of art and technology. Gallery One will be updated to Gallery One 2.0 this summer, a move that will create the same interactive experience without the touch screens and through the introduction of mirrors in which a visitor’s reflection will trigger the launch of a game.

Contact Roberta Gedert at: rgedert@theblade.com or 419-724-6075 or on Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published January 29, 2017, 5:00 a.m.