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All Ages
Note: Pay what you wish on Community Days, when museum entry is on a first-come, first-served basis. Entry is subject to capacity; admission is not guaranteed. We don't accept group or field trip reservations; group entry is discouraged due to large crowds.
You’re invited to walk, bike, or take public transit to Pier 15 on September 21! This festive Community Day wraps up Transportation/Transformations, a week exploring the future of sustainable transportation. On Saturday, September 21, pay what you wish, get a peek at new transportation technology, experience more than 650 hands-on exhibits, enjoy our café and restaurant, and more at our beautiful San Francisco bayside location. Plan your visit.
¡Camina, anda en bicicleta o toma el transporte público al Pier 15 el 21 de septiembre! Trae a toda la familia y paga lo que desees. Disfruta de más de 650 exhibiciones interactivas y echa un vistazo a la novedosa tecnología del transporte en nuestra hermosa ubicación junto a la bahía de San Francisco. Planifica tu visita.
就在9月21日,以步行、騎自行車或乘坐公共交通工具前往15號碼頭! 只需要支付您想要支付的金額,就可以帶領全家來參觀。 您可以在我們美麗的舊金山海灣地點欣賞超過650個互動展品,並率先了解新的運輸技術。計劃參觀。
Transportation/Transformations Community Day is part of Transportation/Transformations Week. This event is made possible through the generous support of Cruise.
LiDAR City Tour
With Cruise
10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Osher Gallery 1
Glimpse your favorite city landmarks in the city through LiDAR. Light Detection and Ranging sensors use lasers to measure distance to generate precise, 3-D information about the world. The views that manifest render familiar landmarks into surprising and captivating hyper-colors. While the view is fascinating, it is the depth of detail that makes this technology an essential component of the Cruise perception and navigation system.
Self-Driving Cars—Up Close
With Cruise
10:00–5:00 p.m.
Bechtel Gallery 3
How do self-driving vehicles navigate our city? Dive into this cutting-edge technology that can identify and safely respond to objects and movement, such as pedestrians in a crosswalk or cyclists making unexpected turns. Learn how Cruise cars use cameras, radar, and LiDAR sensors to maneuver through a complex urban setting like San Francisco. Understand the environmentally friendly solutions that keep these vehicles moving toward a sustainable transportation future.
Embarcadero Highway, 1982
With Amos Goldbaum
11:00 a.m.–1:30 p.m.
Osher Gallery 1, Black Box
See the pollutants caused by fossil fuels transformed into art. Developed at a lab at MIT, AirInk is the first art ink created entirely through air pollution. AirInk creators Gravity Labs aim to transform air pollution in a way that it doesn’t reach our lungs or waste streams, but instead manifests as something beautiful, while also drawing attention to the need for us to move away from fossil fuels.
We invited San Francisco–based artist Amos Goldbaum to use AirInk to create a commissioned artwork that showcases the shifts we have already seen in San Francisco’s transportation ecology. Working from a historic photograph, Goldbaum will highlight our 30-years lost “blight of the Bay”—the Embarcadero Freeway. Called an eyesore, monstrosity, and evil, the highway, which once passed by the front doors of the Exploratorium, fell in the 1989 earthquake.
A Ride in 2049
With Expanding Focus
11:00 a.m.–1:30 p.m.
Osher Gallery 1, Black Box
What will cities look like in the future and how will we navigate them? A Ride in 2049 is a virtual reality experience that explores imagined future mobility systems in three cities: Frankfurt, Chicago, and Los Angeles. On your trip you’ll be led by Myra, a future anthropologist, who tours you through these future cities and encourages you to think through what you want out of the future of transportation. What new technology may dominate these future transportation pathways? And how will this future impact our cities? Strap on a headset and imagine the future with us.
Can You “See” as Well as a Self-Driving Car?
With Cruise
11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
Bechtel Gallery 3, Wattis Webcast Studio
How many relevant objects can you identify on the road? From pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles to traffic and construction signs, staying vigilant of your surroundings can feel overwhelming to some. Self-driving cars rely on a suite of sensors and machine learning to accurately identify objects to safely navigate the city. Play a game to see if you can accurately and quickly identify as many objects as a Cruise car.
Saturday Cinema: (Past) Future Visions
With Cinema Arts
2:00 p.m.
Osher Gallery 1, Kanbar Forum
Future speculation is one of humans favorite past times. Indulge in a slew of vintage films that showcase the many directions that we once thought transportation could be headed. While some visions are spectacularly off the mark, others showcase surprisingly accurate—and specific—insight into just where we were headed. Created during an era of advertising that often looked toward Hollywood norms for inspiration, many of these predications are nestled into delightfully bizarre musicals. Bonus! Maybe you’ll stumble in at just the right time to hear BART’s confidence-lacking theme song.