UPDATE 4 December 2019: The Big Bang AR app won the Google Play Best of 2019 winner in the Hidden Gems category. It was also one of the four selected apps nominated for the BAFTA Children Awards.
Experience the 13.8-billion-year-old story of the universe in just seven minutes with CERN’s new Big Bang app. Launched today at the Google Arts and Culture event in Washington D.C., the app, which is free and available for download, uses augmented or mixed reality to create an immersive adventure to explore our origin.
“One of CERN's missions is to educate and engage people from all over the world with science and technology. With this app, we hope to reach new audiences and share with everyone the story of the origin of our universe in an inspiring way,” says Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN’s Director for International Relations.
To activate the Big Bang AR app, the user must open and close their fist in view of their smartphone’s camera. Voice-over instructions by Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton guide the user from the swirling soup of quark-gluon plasma, through the formation of protons and neutrons, the evolution of atoms and molecules, and the birth of stars and planets to the universe as we know it today. Besides the app, CERN has created five guided tours for Google Arts and Culture’s Inventions and Discoveries page, including one on the invention of the World Wide Web and another on the discovery of the Higgs boson.