Exploratorium Free Day: Fall Community Day | SF

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Exploratorium Community Free Days | 2020

The Exploratorium is a twenty-first-century learning laboratory, an eye-opening, always-changing, playful place to explore and tinker featuring hundreds of science, art, and human perception exhibits.

While they don’t have monthly community days, they do host certain special events throughout the year offering “pay-what-you-can” admission for all.

Please note, in past years, there were 4-6 free community days, but in 2020 there is only one. Enjoy free admission on Mother’s Day (May 10, 2020).

Saturday, September 21, 2019
Exploratorium Community Free Days | 2020

Fall Community Day Programs

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.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.