Detour provides location-aware narratives for 10 cities around the world and is further collaborating with cultural institutions for indoor experiences. (link) The company’s innovation lies exploiting built-in technologies of the phone: the gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS. Using data from these sources, the audio tour adjusts to the user’s location so they never run ahead or fall behind the narration. Furthermore, the company is exploring indoor tours such as their collaboration with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. By using wifi to locate users within the building, they’ve created ‘conditional’ audio tours rather than linear narratives. Visitors move through galleries freely, triggering specific audio clips to be played as their location is identified.
Audio Tour Hacks creates audio tours of art exhibitions reimagined in new contexts. Some of their work has included children analyzing art on display at the MoMA or presenting John Chamberlain’s sculptures as an exhibition about the Transformers.

Ideas
- An audio tour that is irrespective of location, but is direction/action-oriented. Walk north for five minutes, consider your surroundings. Is it a trail in a park? A busy street? A rural road? If you encounter someone going the same direction, slow down. Would this be classified more as a guided meditation through physical space?
- An audio tour narrated by tweets collected around hashtags with pitstops provided by geotags.
- An audio tour of the internet. Is it link-based, using the endless connections afforded by related Wikipedia articles? If someone narrated their internet navigation, could listeners follow along?