Museums are places we often go to connect with our pasts. The Cleveland Museum of Art , however, is also giving us a glimpse of the future.

The museum recently installed what it claims is the nation's largest multi-touch screen, where as many as 16 visitors at a time can explore the 3,500 works in the permanent collection on display. Pieces are presented as thumbnails on a 40-foot-wide moving grid. Visitors can click on individual images to pull up more information, and to discover similar items by category (such as African art), artist, medium or period.

The wall, housed in a space called Gallery One, is designed to foster stronger engagement between visitors and individual items in the collection, says Caroline Goeser, director of education and interpretation at the museum. It may introduce a visitor to a work of art for the first time, perhaps in a wing of the museum she had never thought to visit before, or bring about a "deeper encounter" with a work she already knows well.

The wall is designed not just for discovery, but for acting on that discovery. Using the museum's ArtLens iPad app, visitors can link to the wall to add works to their own custom museum tours. They can also opt into pre-designed, narrated tours developed by the museum's curators. Additionally, the app's image-recognition tool allows visitors to scan artworks to pull up more information, save them to their favorites and share their interpretations with friends via social media. Ultimately, it allows for a less linear, more layered and personalized tour through the museum than an audio guide.

Visitors can download the ArtLens app onto their iPads, or borrow one from the museum. Volunteer hosts have been installed in Gallery One to introduce visitors to the space and to the app.

I asked Goesser if the museum's technology initiatives sprung out of a desire to integrate technology into the museum experience, or if they proved to be the best solutions to an original set of goals. Goesser says it's the latter. The museum's primary goals were to respond to what visitors wanted, and to encourage new people to enter the museum, particularly those who don't frequently go to any museums.

"Our visitors typically wanted two things," she said. "The first segment wanted a structured gallery experience, a way for them to figure out the best thing to do in the 30 minutes they had for a visit. The second group wanted to take on the galleries as they own projects, to browse and learn more about the works they like. We built technology specifically to respond to those visitor behaviors."

Although it's unlikely that most or even many other museums will replicate Gallery One in their own spaces, it shows an openness and willingness, on museum administrators' parts, to rethink traditional visiting experiences to achieve their chief goals: In this case, to foster interest and better educate visitors about works of art. Other museums, from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, are making similar efforts, hosting hack days and launching apps to induce innovation.

Photo courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art