Hippies Meet Augmented Reality With Berkeley Art Museum's 'Free the Love' App

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) has created an augmented reality app, in partnership with Adobe, to promote its new exhibition "Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia."

The exhibit, which explores the intersection of the radical art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s and the resonance of these innovations today, opened yesterday, and will run until May 21.

Developed with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the Free the Love app enables people in the Bay Area to release augmented-reality "love balloons" into the skies, with personal messages of peace, love, and togetherness inside. Using the app, people can write messages and leave their own love balloons throughout San Francisco and beyond. Using their phones' cameras, users can also search the skies for love balloons released by others.

The app's design uses "hippie-inspired fonts" to bring the messages to life in a modern way, and was inspired by many of the pieces of art in the Hippie Modernism exhibit, several of which are featured in the app's educational "Love Tour." Developed in partnership with the California Historical Society, the Love Tour highlights historical hippie sites of the Bay Area.