At 9:32 a.m. Tuesday, exactly 50 years after the liftoff of Apollo 11 in Florida on its historic voyage to the moon, the sun reflected off dozens of smartphones held high in the air in Dorchester as a crowd cheered.
Looking at their screens, people could see the 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket blast off, as if it were on the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s patio with the glittering Boston Harbor in the background, rather than on a launchpad in Florida.
The augmented reality experience was made possible by the JFK Moonshot app, which was released in Apple and Android app stores last month as part of the library’s yearlong celebration of the mission that sent men to the moon for the first time.
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App users who could not attend the event could watch the launch on the app on any flat surface in their house.
The library partnered with the digital marketing agency Digitas and the production company Unit9 to develop the app. The app includes more than 100 hours of archival footage and audio recording, as well as games that test space history knowledge. It will be used as an educational tool at the library and beyond.
John Lewis, 35, and his 8-year-old son, Ari, woke up at 5:45 a.m. to drive from Amherst to watch the augmented reality simulation. Lewis took the day off from work and gave his son the day off from summer school.
“There’s been a lot of advances in space in the last couple of years, which had made it interesting to follow,” Lewis said. He said he felt the experience was educational for his son, who could go back to school now “and talk about things that his teachers might not even know.”
Zachary Poitras, 13, and his father visited the presidential library on their vacation in Boston, having driven down Monday from New Brunswick, Canada.
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Poitras said he could not download the app because he did not have an American data plan, but he said it was interesting to see how people reacted to the historic event 50 years later.
“It is American,” Poitras said of the Apollo 11 mission. “But I also see it as the first human on the moon. It’s a global event.”
Another function on the app allows users to retrace the original path from the earth to the moon in real time. The remainder of the five-day mission will be streamed on Twitch, the world’s most popular live-streaming platform.
Mark Philip, vice president and group creative director at Digitas in Boston, said the company noticed that younger people were less aware of the role John F. Kennedy played in the first moon landing and wanted to appeal to that generation.
“When you think about how people experienced the launch — they watched it in person or on TV,” Philip said. “The younger generation doesn’t watch TV, so that’s why we decided to do it on mobile augmented reality and create the livestream on Twitch to let them experience this in a way that’s similar to 1969 but more relevant to them in 2019.”
Steven Rothstein, executive director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, described the event as “a tribute to where we’ve been and an aspiration to where we’re going.”
“John Kennedy brought the United States together,” Rothstein said, citing the 400,000 people who worked in the government, in NASA, and in universities to realize Kennedy’s “bold idea” to send a man to the moon. “Our country needs to do that again.”
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“Augmented reality is still a relatively new technology. We hope it will capture people, energize people, and excite people — just as 50 years ago, half a billion people watched the landing on the moon,” Rothstein added.
Sarah Wu can be reached at sarah.wu@globe.com