Enhancing user experience at museums using smart phones with RFID

Proceedings of the International Conferences ICT, Society, and Human Beings 2019; Connected Smart Cities 2019; and Web Based Communities and Social Media 2019, 2019

In this work we propose an integrated system to manage and enhance the museums visiting experience for the general public, providing a more comfortable, intelligent and interactive way to visit multiple museums without the need for several mobile applications, whilst giving a tool to museum curators that allows them to easily manage and extend the content displayed to each individual visitor. For that purpose, our approach was to develop a single mobile application, a module to an open-source Content Management System (CMS), namely Drupal 8, and incorporate location information inferred by the capture of BLE’s signals (beacons). The proposed prototype features an Android application that will be used by the visitors where they can access the available inform ation about several museums, and combined with BLE’s, will display information about the museum and spaces of the museum where the visitor is (or is planning to visit). This application gives the option to choose from several languages that are provided and managed by each museum.

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2010

Tourism plays an important role in the economies of many countries. Tourism can secure employment, foreign exchange earnings, investment and regional development. To attract more tourists and local visitors, many stakeholders such as natural parks, museums, art galleries, hotels and restaurants provide personalised services to meet individual needs. With the increasing number of tourists comes an increased demand for guides at education-oriented leisure centers. Each provided needs unique way to present their services. In this study, these educational leisure centres are coarsely divided into art and science. This paper introduces the architecture of the proposed guide system including a PDA-based recommendation guide for art museums and an Radiofrequency identification-based interactive learning system using collaborative filtering technology for science and engineering education. Evaluations of the two systems reveal that the system inspires and nurtures visitors' interest in science and arts.

PsychNology Journal

Museums are the mechanism through which we research, interpret and present our insights into the natural and cultural worlds. They represent our belief systems concerning cultural inter-relationships, our relationship with the environment and of our place in the Universe. They are windows on the "dream-time" of humanity. Wireless technology is becoming a part of the museum experience. In an effort to bring art and science to life for a new generation of technically sophisticated patrons, an increasing number of museums are experimenting with advanced mobile technologies to make museum going more interactive, more educational -and more fun. An ideal electronic guide to a museum is one that you take at the entrance, put in your pocket and forget you have. It should fully support a free, natural visit providing the most appropriate information at the right time and place. The only activity required of visitors is to enjoy the exhibition: the interaction is with the (augmented) museum, no longer with the guide; the guide analyses the context and composes presentations adapted to the current situation. In this paper we present the results of an experimentation conducted in the Florence's Uffizi Gallery with groups of user using the MOBILearn systems a novel application based on innovative mobile-learning services specifically designed to improve the Museum "experience". The main objective of this paper is to describe the results of qualitative research into the behavior of users during the trial. In particular the paper will present the participants' overall experience, responses and needs; the participants' responses to, and perceptions of, specific system capabilities (including responses relevant to the particular device they used in the trial), pointing to comments and suggestions that may serve to improve the system; and will finally identify "key findings" and provide general observations on how the MOBILearn system can change users' experience of a museum.

PsychNology Journal, 2007

Museums are the mechanism through which we research, interpret and present our insights into the natural and cultural worlds. They represent our belief systems concerning cultural interrelationships , our relationship with the environment and of our place in the Universe. They are windows on the "dream-time" of humanity. Wireless technology is becoming a part of the museum experience. In an effort to bring art and science to life for a new generation of technically sophisticated patrons, an increasing number of museums are experimenting with advanced mobile technologies to make museum going more interactive, more educational-and more fun. An ideal electronic guide to a museum is one that you take at the entrance, put in your pocket and forget you have. It should fully support a free, natural visit providing the most appropriate information at the right time and place. The only activity required of visitors is to enjoy the exhibition: the interaction is with the (augmented) museum, no longer with the guide; the guide analyses the context and composes presentations adapted to the current situation. In this paper we present the results of an experimentation conducted in the Florence's Uffizi Gallery with groups of user using the MOBILearn systems a novel application based on innovative mobile-learning services specifically designed to improve the Museum "experience". The main objective of this paper is to describe the results of qualitative research into the behavior of users during the trial. In particular the paper will present the participants' overall experience, responses and needs; the participants' responses to, and perceptions of, specific system capabilities (including responses relevant to the particular device they used in the trial), pointing to comments and suggestions that may serve to improve the system; and will finally identify "key findings" and provide general observations on how the MOBILearn system can change users' experience of a museum.

A survey with 94 science museums in the United States was conducted to examine how science museums in the United States have utilized advanced technologies (e.g., mobile phone interactive programs). This study explores the use of mobile phones to enrich the visitor experience in 94 science museums in the United States. Most museums were not using mobile phones, and for the minority that were, their decision to adopt the technology was primarily visitordriven: the most popular exhibits, extra exhibit content, and visitor recommendations. These museums were not significantly influenced by peer institutions with similar programs, indicating that they were responding less to industry best practices, and more to visitors' needs. Museums made a clear distinction between hands-on exhibits and mobile phone interactivity. Museums not using mobile technology were emphatic about maintaining the hands-on nature of their exhibits, and saw mobile phones as a distraction from these exhibits, and as a passive medium that reduced the visitor's ability to interact with exhibits. This study revealed that mobile phone technology in U.S. science museums is still an emerging trend, but there was great interest in using this technology in the near future.

2013

Deployment of technologies that alleviates the effects of human fatigue and monotony can enhance the experience of visitors in the museums. Audio recordings can be played back repeatedly without deterioration brought about by fatigue and boredom. Such technologies based on Radio Frequency ID tags can be used to identify or tag an artifact. A recording or multimedia presentation can be associated to a particular tag. This presentation can be activated or played back in a portable device when it detects the tag. The portable device is carried by the tour guide. In this study, a portable device is developed to scan or detect an RF tag and play back an audio recording describing the artifact. It utilizes the NIOSII softcore processor and implemented on Altera Corporation's DE2 FPGA Development Board using Quatus II SOPC Builder. Tests showed that the system is able to detect the tag placed in the artifact and played back the corresponding wav audio recording with 100% accuracy.

Journal of Media Research, vol 7, issue 3 (20) / 2014

Abstract: This paper focuses on the use of mobile technologies and their ability to engage audiences in a new type of exploration that enriches the museum experience. The rapid expansions of media technology, the universal access to the Internet, the continuous online presence in the social media are fundamentally changing the cultural experience. In the entertainment and the new museum era, the issue is no longer whether new media and technologies should be used by cultural institutions (more precisely, in this article, museums), but how they may be used so that they heighten the visitor experience. Therefore, we will explore the new relationship between technology and museums and the ways in which newly emerging technologies such as augmented reality could be used in order to transform the audience’s encounter with culture. Key words: mobile technologies, museum experience, Smartphone apps, augmented reality, Google Glass

Proceedings of 2019 the 9th International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering, 2019

People often regard the museum as a boring place, something old-fashioned, not interesting place to go, and do not have a correlation with the present. In fact the museum is a good place as a source of learning about human history and culture. This research try to build museum interactive edutainment (education and entertainment) application using mobile phone apps and QR code. This application will provide additional interactive information about the museum artefacts. Museum visitors could find this information by scan the QR code that attach to the museum artefact. The application will do the scanning process simply by using mobile phone camera. This QR code ID then sent to the server to receive artefact additional information such as text, image, sound, and video. This application already tested to 162 museum young visitors, the results is 75.9% respondents find that this application very interesting as a learning media.

… (ISM), 2011 IEEE …, 2011

In this paper we present a work-in-progress interactive exhibit for the museum of Onna, a little town near to L'Aquila (Italy), almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of April 2009. The installation will be developed as an environment in which visitors of the museum can interact with a natural interaction system and then discover the history of the disaster via rich multimedia contents. Visitors are detected through the adoption of an RFID-based technology, which allows to store their interaction history and build an interest profile used to enrich the experience. Different scenarios have been implemented and tested in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

The current paper provides details on the set-up of the demonstration scenario to be used in a cultural heritage environment with the support of the AXMEDIS tools. The devised scenario addresses filtered access to content held into museum repositories using smart tags technology and tactile manipulation. Proper balance between push of information triggered by interaction with ambient tags and pull of further information triggered by user interaction via tangible interface enables a totally new experience in the museum context. Furthermore adoption of AXMEDIS framework enables the possibility to achieve a distributed production scenario for semi-automated, template-based content production where satellite broadcast is used to handle geographically dispersed, synchronized updates, while peer to peer is used for sporadic updating.

2008

Recent technological advances enable novel interactive software environments to support users in several contexts for different objectives. Museums are a particularly suitable context in which to experiment with new interaction techniques for guiding visitors and improving their experience. In this paper, we discuss a multi-device and location-aware museum guide. It is a mobile guide able to opportunistically exploit large screens when they are nearby the user. Various types of games are included in addition to the museum and artwork descriptions, including games involving multiple visitors. The mobile guide is equipped with an RFID reader, which provides information useful to detect the current user position. By taking into account context-dependent information including the current user position, the history of user behaviour, and the device(s) at hand, more personalised and relevant information is provided to the user, enabling a richer overall experience.

Mobivisit (former Mobiguide) is the combination of an indoor and outdoor portable tourist guide. The first experimentations took place in Lyon, in 2003, on POCKET PCs for both the indoor and outdoor guide, on the occasion of a project undertaken by France Telecom Research and Development division. Today, the outdoor version of Mobivisit is commercialized both for Pocket PCs and mobile phones. The goal in Lyon was to do a usability test with a multimedia tourist guide, in the city and the surrounding region as well as in the museum of Fine Arts. Much emphasis was placed on examining the continuity of usage between indoor and outdoor cultural settings. During the first three months of the experimentations, approximately 500 tourists borrowed the multimedia guide from the main Lyon Tourist Information Office - situated on Bellecour square - to test it free of charge, for a period of one to three days. A second experimentation took place in the museum, with three different target groups...

proceedings Special Session …, 2007

Mobile devices as smart phones or PDA are common devices in our daily life. Museums and art galleries are provided with some electronic guides in order to do more pleasant the visit to the exhibition. Our research group has been working in designing and developing mobile software for art museums based on PDA. The problem studied in this paper is to prove the suitableness of using PDA instead of the traditional electronic guides. It is interesting to know how to use these devices as a medium to guide and improve the visitors' experience. Before presenting the components of our solution we introduce the important items and concepts by means of our conceptual model.

Rethinking Technology in Museums 2011. Emerging experiences, 2011

Since 2009 museums have started introducing mobile apps in their range of interpretative media and visitor services. As mobile technology continues to develop and permeate all aspects of our life, and the capabilities of smart phones increase while they become more accessible and popular, new possibilities arise for cultural institutions to exploit these tools for communicating in new ways and promoting their exhibitions and programmes. The use of mobile apps opens up new channels of communication between the cultural institution and the user, which extent to his or her personal space and go beyond the boundaries of the museum's walls. The paper presents a survey carried out of mobile apps designed by art or cultural historical museums and analyses the wider issues which are raised by the findings. It discusses, among others, the kind of use these apps were designed to fulfil (e.g. the majority are guided tours to the permanent collections or to temporary exhibitions), the layering of content,and the type of user interaction and involvement they support.