The app will be based on the popular touring exhibition, which closed its doors for good back in July

An official app based on the David Bowie Is… exhibition is set to launch in January 2019, it has been confirmed.

The exhibition – which explored “the broad range of the late artist’s collaborations with artists and designers in the fields of fashion, sound, graphics, theatre, art, and film” – shut permanently back in July, five years after it debuted at the V&A in London (where it became the renowned institution’s most-visited touring exhibition). Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh curated the exhibition, which drew over 2 million visitors across 12 cities.

After first being announced back in the summer, the David Bowie Is… app has now been green-lit for a launch on January 8, 2019 to mark what would’ve been Bowie’s 72nd birthday.

The Augmented Reality (AR) app will be available in iOS and Android, and will grant fans access to the show’s hundreds of costumes, videos, handwritten lyrics, original works of art and much more. Dozens of items not featured in the original exhibition will also be included, including some entirely new and exclusive to the AR version of the app.

The David Bowie Is… AR mobile app is the first release to emerge from a new collaboration between the David Bowie Archive and Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., who hosted the exhibition in Tokyo in 2017. New York-based studio Planeta is designing and developing the AR/VR interpretations of the original museum experience at the V&A.

A VR version of the app will be released at a later date.

It was recently announced that Bowie’s legendary 2000 headline performance at Glastonbury will be released in full for the very first time later this month.