Computer History Museum × Meta's Project Aria: Building an AI-Guided Tour for Everyone
By Kirsten Tashev | October 08, 2026
Editor’s Note: The Project Aria research demo described here is in early research and is not open for public viewing.
Over the past few months, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has partnered with Meta's Project Aria to build an AI-guided museum tour experience. The goal was to explore what a museum visit could look like with AI-powered glasses, and how that technology might make museums more accessible to everyone.
The Experience
In this experience, a visitor takes a guided tour of the museum while wearing Project Aria research glasses. It showcases two key features:
- Spatial Audio Navigation: The visitor hears a directional beacon sound or the AI agent's voice coming from a specific point in space, and simply walks toward it to move through the tour.
- Conversational AI Guide: The AI on the glasses narrates each exhibit along the way, and the visitor can ask follow-up questions or interrupt at any time.
The AI guide's responses drew only on knowledge that was created by CHM curators. Over several months, CHM and the Project Aria team walked the galleries together, chose the route, shaped what the guide says at each stop, and grounded the narration in the museum's own voice.
Project Aria’s Accessibility Research was Key
The technologies explored in this experience grew out of Project Aria research with blind and low vision communities, in partnership with Lighthouse Guild. Thomas Panek, Lighthouse Guild's President and CEO, took the tour with his guide dog, Shadow. He navigated a space he had never visited before on his own, asking the AI guide questions about the exhibits and learning the history along the way.
"As I was going from exhibit to exhibit, it was actually helping me navigate as a person who can't see … It was a fully accessible, immersive museum experience. I think it’s amazing." — Thomas Panek, President & CEO, Lighthouse Guild
This experience showed that AI powered glasses can make a museum visit more engaging, more personal, and more accessible all at once. A visitor can find their way through an unfamiliar gallery by sound, ask whatever question comes to mind, and hear an answer grounded in the museum's own expertise. We see this as an early look at what historic and cultural spaces could feel like when wayfinding and interpretation are both built in from the start, and CHM, Lighthouse Guild and Meta are excited to keep exploring it further together.
What’s Next
While the Project Aria research demo described here is in early research and is not open for public viewing, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has opened its first XR exhibition to the public.
Extended Reality: Visions of the Future is open to the public at the Computer History Museum, 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, CA, from October 1, 2026 through March 28, 2027. It covers six decades of the field, from Ivan Sutherland's 1968 headset to the AI glasses people wear today, across more than 100 historic and contemporary devices. On display are Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta’s Project Aria research glasses, Google Glass prototypes, the Nintendo Virtual Boy, Apple Vision Pro, and more.
Interactive XR demonstrations during the XR exhibition run on select Saturdays, 1–4 p.m.: October 3, October 24, November 7, November 21, December 19, and January 2 and may extend beyond those dates.
Plan your visit and see the full schedule at computerhistory.org/xr.