Brooklyn Museum Launches New Smart Phone Customized Gallery Tours

Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum with mobile phones with Internet access will be able to create their own gallery guides to the permanent collections.

Using the program, visitors who bring their Web-enabled phones will be able to create their own gallery tours and to suggest works of art to fellow visitors.

Based on the visitor's initial selections, the guide will generate additional recommendations about works to see.

Anyone who wants to will now also be able to create sets of annotated objects, which function as customized tours, through the Museum Web site.

For example, a visitor to the ancient Egyptian galleries containing more than 1,200 objects might focus on the Old Kingdom section, encompassing Dynasties 3 through 6, from 2675 through 2170 B.C.

There, they might select a limestone group statue depicting a man, his wife, and their small son that was the first major work of Egyptian art ever exhibited in America.

Given their interest in this statue, the program then might suggest that the visitor look at three elaborately painted wooden tomb statues depicting a man at various stages of his life and an exquisite alabaster statue of the child King Pepy II seated on the lap of his mother.