Enabling Mobile Phones To Support Large-Scale Museum Guidance
“Mobile phones have the potential of becoming a future platform for personal museum guidance. They enable full multimedia presentations and –assuming that the visitors are using their own devices– will significantly reduce acquisition and maintenance cost for museum operators. However, several technological challenges have to be mastered before this concept can be successful. One of them is the question of how individual museum objects can be intuitively identified before presenting corresponding information. We have developed an enhanced museum guidance system called PhoneGuide that uses widespread camera equipped mobile phones for on-device object recognition in combination with pervasive tracking. It provides additional location- and object-aware multimedia content to museum visitors, and is scalable to cover a large number of museum objects. In a field survey our system was able to identify 155 real museum exhibits from multiple perspectives with a recognition rate of 95% and a classification speed of less than one second per object. A coarse grid of only eight low-cost Bluetooth emitters distributed over two museum floors was used to achieve these results. Once an object has been recognized, related multimedia presentations such as videos, audio , text, computer graphics and images are displayed on the phone.”
Follow the link below to find out more. This is just one of a bunch of really fascinating research projects going at Bauhaus University. I’m starting to think it’s time for a German vacation…
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