'David Bowie Is' mobile app narrated by Gary Oldman

The Oscar, Golden Globe and three-time Bafta-winning actor has lent his dulcet tones to the David Bowie is Augmented Reality mobile app, which is released on iOS and Android on 8th January; what would have been Bowie’s 72nd birthday.

Oldman says of the app: “This brings the amazing David Bowie is exhibition to a wider audience. It’s great that his fans get to experience it. It was a privilege to be involved.”

Bowie and Oldman first met in the 1980s and had a mutual affinity due to their South London upbringing. Oldman once said: “I see him less as 'David Bowie’ and more as Dave from Brixton and I'm Gary from New Cross.”

They later worked together Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film ‘Basquiat’ and Oldman starred as a bishop in the notorious video for Bowie’s single ‘The Next Day’ in 2013.

Oldman also collected the posthumous Brits Icon award for David Bowie at the 2016 Brit Awards and has hosted the Celebrating David Bowie concerts.

Displaying history, artefacts and information about the life and career of Bowie, the David Bowie Is exhibition opened at the London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in March 2013 and went on to call in at 11 further museums in 10 countries around the globe.

According to a statement on David Bowie’s website, the David Bowie Is app gives fans “access to the show’s hundreds of costumes, videos, handwritten lyrics, original works of art and more to the tens of millions of Bowie fans unable to visit the exhibition before it shuttered permanently on July 15, 2018.

“This virtual reality adaption of David Bowie is will enable the visitor to spend as long as desired on individual items and jump to others.”

It continues: “The digital experience, a first of its kind, will deliver an astonishing, but deftly connected sequence of audio-visual spaces through which the work and artefacts of Bowie’s life can be experienced.

“3D scans will preserve and present his fabulous costumes and treasured objects in meticulous detail. The experience may even allow a spectator to virtually step into one of Bowie’s outfits and see themselves in it.”

There will also be dozens of items not in the original exhibition. The app will cost fans £7.99.