Adaptable, Personalizable and Multi User Museum Exhibits

Two dimensional paintings were exhibited in museums and art galleries in the same manner since at least three centuries. However, the emergence of novel interactive technologies provides the opportunity to change this status quo. By 2006, according to the Institute for Museum and Library Services, 43 % of museum visits in the U.S. were remote. According to the Institute for the Future, “Emerging technologies are transforming everything that constitutes our notion of “reality” – our ability to sense our surroundings, our capacity to reason, our perception of the world”. In the present age, that technology is becoming mixed to the fabric of reality to offer novel experiences in Cultural Heritage Institutions. This work presents the design and implementation of a technological framework based on ambient intelligence to enhance visitor experiences within Heritage Institutions by augmenting two dimensional paintings. Among the major contributions of this chapter is the support of personalized multi user access to exhibits, facilitating also adaptation mechanisms for altering the interaction style and content based on the requirements of each Heritage Institution’s visitor. A standards compliant knowledge representation and the appropriate authoring tools guarantee the effective integration of this approach in any relevant context. The developed applications have been deployed within a simulation space of the FORTH-ICS AmI facility and evaluated by users in the context of a pilot study.