ARTIZT: Applying Ambient Intelligence to a Museum Guide Scenario

2013

In this paper, we present an ongoing project developed within DATABENC, a high technology district for Cultural Heritage management. In particular, the project aims at exploiting several location-based services and technologies to realize a smart multimedia guide system able to detect user position and make objects of a museum exhibition able to "talk" during tourists' visit and capable of automatically telling their story using multimedia facilities. Moreover, we have deployed in the museum rooms a particular Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that, using Bluetooth technology, is able to sense the surrounding area for detecting user devices' presence. Once a device has been detected, the related MAC address is retrieved and multimedia contents of the closest museum artworks are delivered to user using proper multimedia delivery techniques to facilitate and make more stimulating the visit. As case of study, we show an example of "talking" museum as a smart multimedia guide of sculptures' art exhibition within the Maschio Angioino castle, in Naples (Italy).

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2013

Even though information devices and systems have been widely applied in guidance service for museums and exhibitions, there are still several critical requirements unsatisfied. In our research, we systematically examine the requirements and then propose a new architecture for museum/exhibition guidance service; we further, based on ZigBee and ontology, implemented a new guide device and a new guidance and recommendation system. The contributions include (1) an extendable and comprehensive architecture for guidance service; (2) an automatic and personalized guidance service system; (3) overcoming the limitations and weaknesses of conventional guidance systems short distance limitation and network saturation problem in crowded environments; and (4) on-line user status monitoring and real-time recommendation service.

In this paper we examine the requirements for deploying advanced Location Based Guidance Services in museum and/or exhibition environments, and we propose an architectural approach that copes with these requirements. The proposed architecture provides automatic and on demand audiovisual content retrieval, both on-site and through the Web, to different classes of users. On-site services are provided through Java enabled devices, which exploit the user’s contextual state, mainly defined as visitor location and organization of exhibits. The main distinguishing characteristic of the proposed architecture is that it separates the positioning system from the content access mechanisms, while being generic to the selection of the localization technology and the terminal device characteristics. Furthermore, it is built as an open, modular platform comprising a core of reusable components and interfaces for supporting different types of services and devices, including widespread Java and Bluetooth enabled smart phones, while being able to reuse already existing content structures. A test case of a museum e-guidance application for Bluetooth enabled smart phones is presented.

2016

The current localization techniques heavily depend upon theGlobal Positioning System (GPS)technology. However, this technology has its limits in indoor locations. In places like malls and underground parking's, the GPS accuracy is greatly affected. Indoor localization requires higher accuracy and thus the use of GPS is not feasible in such scenarios. Smartphones contain multiple sensors and hardware such as GPS receivers, accelerometers, and gyroscope sensors. Moreover almost all the smartphones are equipped with Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 connectivity. This paper explores the possibility of using the IEEE 802.11 signal strength and the Bluetooth signal strength combined with the smartphone sensors of the accelerometer to determine indoor location of the user.In this project, an indoor localization technique is proposed, for a scenario in a museum environment. Moreover after estimating the position, context based information will be provided to the user.

Sensors, 2021

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that connects objects to provide seamless communication and contextual information to anyone, anywhere, at any time (AAA). These Internet-of-Things-enabled automated objects interact with visitors to present a variety of information during museum navigation and exploration. In this article, a smart navigation and information system (SNIS) prototype for museum navigation and exploration is developed, which delivers an interactive and more exciting museum exploration experience based on the visitor’s personal presence. The objects inside a museum share the information that assist and navigate the visitors about the different sections and objects of the museum. The system was deployed inside Chakdara Museum and experimented with 381 users to achieve the results. For results, different users marked the proposed system in terms of parameters such as interesting, reality, ease of use, satisfaction, usefulness, and user friendly. Of these 381 ...

2017

The internet of things technologies can be exploited to provide the museum visitors with many kinds of advanced services. The visitor interests are renovated and the smart environment within a museum provides an interactive experience for the visitor. In this work, we design a wearable museum guide which can automatically provide the audio description of the museum collection the visitor is observing. Along with the image recognition capability, the wearable device also has localization feature. The museum admin is able to continuously track the user within the museum. This is achieved using a Bluetooth Low Energy infrastructure installed within the museum. The localization information can be used to provide more services for the visitors and also used by the museum staff for museum maintenances. All the cultural contents are stored in the cloud and retrieved whenever they are demanded by the user. The item is identified and the corresponding description is fetched from the cloud an...

IEEE International Conference on Software-Science, Technology & Engineering (SwSTE'07), 2007

Nowadays, technology enables museums to become "active". Shortly, museum visitors will be equipped with smart personal devices and the museum environment will be able to interact proactively with them, offering them various services. Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of today mobile museum guides focus on supporting the individual visitor. Current museum visitor guides and other mobile guides described in the literature sometimes allow interaction between visitors. Such interaction, especially in museums may enhances the overall visit experience. These specific communication services can be abstracted to a general set of context-aware communication services. This paper presents an abstract definition of context-aware communication services for an active museum. The service agent developed in the framework of the PIL project is a prototype system for such general communication services framework. Such framework will ease the development of applications aimed at providing communication services in active environment.

2016

During past few years Indoor navigation systems have been developed in many places such as Airports, Hospitals, Shopping malls, Companies and Museums. Museum 360 is a navigation system design specially for Museums. The system is developed based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons technology instead of using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC) and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) technologies. Rather than traditional museum navigation systems, the implemented solution has a new narrating system for navigation, provide descriptions about the items verbally, providing suggestions to visitors what to visit by analyzing past history and also visitors can collect a soft copy of the tour. Museum 360 has two main components, Android application and the server. The system was developed according to the prototype life cycle methodology. When the system is completed it will benefits both of the visitors and museum staff. Visitors can be able to explore the museum a...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

This paper proposes a PDA-based guide and recommendation system. The intelligent guide provides an alternative to the current audio-based guide tools. Techniques from both data mining and extension theory and RFID technology are deployed to provide better interaction between exhibitions and visitors.

Smart cities are a trading topic in both the academic literature and industrial world. The capability to provide the users with added-value services through low-power and low-cost smart objects is very attractive in many fields. Among these, art and culture represent very interesting examples, as the tourism is one of the main driving engines of modern society. In this paper, we propose an IoT-aware architecture to improve the cultural experience of the user, by involving the most important recent innovations in the ICT field. The main components of the proposed architecture are: (i) an indoor localization service based on the Bluetooth Low Energy technology, (ii) a wearable device able to capture and process images related to the user's point of view, (iii) the user's mobile device useful to display customized cultural contents and to share multimedia data in the Cloud, and (iv) a processing center that manage the core of the whole business logic. In particular, it interact...