RESEARCH – MUSEUM GUIDE

The project PEACH (Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage) dealt with the development of technologies to support museum visitors prior to a museum visit and during the actual stay at the museum. The focus was on the development of technologies that would facilitate the understanding of the offered information in the museum by the visitors.

During the course of the project, several different prototypes were developed. For example, there was a system that would emulate the movements of large numbers of visitors in a museum (based on a 3D-model of the museum and a cognitive model of the simulated users).

Another system was capable of emitting an audio stream to a specific spot in physical space (e.g. focusing on the head of a particular visitor, so the visitor would not have to wear headphones while using the audio guide).

My task in the project was to develop and implement a virtual museum guide. It was implemented on a mobile device (compaq iPAQ) which could be located in the museum by using infrared beacons. Therefore the mobile device was capable of reacting to the current context in the museum and to present location based information. The information was presented by a virtual character. Different characters were available, each representing a different perspective on the content of the museum.

In one particular medieval museum we used two characters: an artist and a lady from the middle-ages. Depending on the chosen character, different stories were being told. The characters were also capable of leaving the mobile device. In one scenario, we used a projector mounted on the ceyling which could rotate 360 degrees on three axes. Hence, we could project the character on any surface in the room. The character would actually walk from one location to another in a natural fashion. Doing so, the character could highlight certain details of the physical objects in the museum by moving next to them and pointing at the detail to be highlighted.

The museum guide was implemented in two actual museums. The Völklinger Hütte and the Museo Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, Italy.

We used Java, Java3D and Flash to develop the prototypes.