A Royal blipp! King Willem-Alexander of Netherlands blipps interactive art

The Blippar app flew over the 8m-user mark this month, and one of these downloads took place on a particularly special mobile phone.

King Willem-Alexander, King of the Kingdom of The Netherlands, presented the Royal Award for Modern Painting 2014 at the Royal Palace Amsterdam, an exhibition that had been enriched with augmented reality content by Blippar.

The King visited the exhibition to present the Royal Award for Modern Painting 2014 at the Royal Palace Amsterdam to four young Dutch artists - Niels Broszat, Koen Doodeman, Bob Eikelboom and Jessica Skowroneck - on Friday 10 October.

After the award ceremony the King opened the exhibition – which features two paintings by each of the four winners, and 20 further paintings submitted by other artists – and toured the gallery, pausing to blipp the paintings and unlock their augmented reality experiences on his mobile phone via the Blippar app.

Hung up beside each painting is a bespoke yellow ‘fingerprint’ badge, each uniquely designed, each blippable. When blipped with mobile phones using the Blippar app, each fingerprint unlocks pictures of other works by each artist and the ability to share the images on social media.

The King admiring one of the paintings in the exhibition, top, and the Palace, below

The four winners’ fingerprints also each unlock a special short video message by the artists about their work. A blippable exhibition poster also has a blipp featuring a compilation video of all four winners.

Gaby Çelebi-Arendsen of the Royal Palace Amsterdam said: 'The Royal Awards for Painting is an incentive prize for young artists. By enriching the exhibition with augmented reality via Blippar we were able to give the artists of the Royal Awards a face. In a video interview the winners explain their work, and in this way visitors get a good idea of the story behind their art.'

A blippable 'fingerprint' AR interaction, top, and someone blipping the exhibtion, below

Dutch TV channels Evangelische Omroep and Nederlandse Omroep Stichting reported on the King’s attendance at the exhibition, as did news sites Volkskrant, NRC, AD, NU, RTL and Vorsten.

Arjen de Vries, Head of Blippar Benelux, commented on the exhibition’s augmented reality enrichment, saying: ‘There is increasing demand from museums and galleries for AR capabilities; by simply using a smartphone as a magic lens it is possible to offer visitors a rich interactive content experience which fits into the current digital world in which we live. Nowadays, the digital possibilities are endless and could be add very relevant value to exhibitions, bringing static artworks to life with videos, interviews, image slideshows, 3D audio tours and more.’

The blippable poster of all four winning artists

The blippable fingerprints of all four winning artists

To learn more about how Blippar can make paintings burst into digital life on mobile phones, tablets and wearables, read about our involvement with the recent Art Everywhere US outdoor exhibition, in which we made 39 pieces of great American art blippable. The interactive paintings were then reproduced 50,000 times and displayed in public spaces nationwide, from bus shelters to billboards to transit hubs, to be brought to vibrant life using our visual browser.