Baseball season, along with peanuts, Crackerjacks, and baseball cards, is back.

Recently, University of Iowa Assistant Professor Kevin Ripka designed two applications that will be displayed in the American Baseball Card Museum in Fresno, California, and some say it could be an innovative way to view museum exhibits.

The inaugural exhibit will début on Friday in the Madden Library at California State University-Fresno.

The exhibit contains 395 cards, including almost 40 featuring Frank Chance, the player-manager who led the Chicago Cubs to their last World Series win, in 1908.

One of the apps called “Fresno Cards” allows people to interact with baseball cards, complete with statistics and information about individual players. Users don’t need to be in the exhibit to use the app, but Ripka said it enhances the museum experience.

“Museums are boring, and people don’t know how to make them fun,” Ripka said. “I love exhibits, but I also hate how passive they are, so I wanted to design something more experiential.”

The other app, which is only available while in the exhibit, allows visitors to view the cards through an “augmented reality.” Visitors can hold a card with a barcode under an iPad, and a virtual baseball card will appear in the app that visitors can interact with.

“You pass them under the iPad, and you can feel the texture and the size and weight of the card but look at it on the screen,” Ripka said.

Ripka brought the apps to Jeff Jaech, curator for the American Baseball Card Museum. The museum is only a temporary, inaugural exhibit in the Madden Library right now, featuring baseball cards and Ripka’s app.

Jaech said he is excited to incorporate them into the exhibit.

“It seems to be the cutting edge of what museums are doing in terms of enhancing the experience,” Jaech said.

Madden Library sees nearly 11,000 visitors per day and holds 2,000 similar events a year. Cindy Wathen, a public-relations specialist at the library, said the baseball card exhibit will be special because of the new technology being featured.

“It’s pretty fascinating; we’re hearing so much more about augmented reality, so we’re really excited that it is going to be featured in this exhibit,” Wathen said. “It’s amazing how fast that technology is evolving, and we think this is going to be more significant, so it will be interesting to see how this audience interacts with it.”

Ripka said he started the project as a way to integrate his love for baseball and his interest in data visualization. He said he started collected baseball cards when he was a kid and recently picked it up again as an adult.