Museum Touring Through an Augmented Reality-Enhanced Robotic Assistant: Improving Learnability and Memory Retention

While museums traditionally cater to visual perception, some are adopting novel approaches to aid visitors with impairments. In recent years, robot-based tour guides have become a popular museum attraction. Instead of traditional guides, special-purpose robots assist people and allow for more engaging multimodal touring. While promising, such robotics guides tend to prioritize efficiency and safety over inclusivity, focusing on collision avoidance and movement. At the same time, accessibility challenges magnified by different approaches to learning and disabilities remain underexplored. To tackle this issue, we propose to enhance robotic touring with augmented reality (AR) to overlay additional information onto a visitor’s view. Previous research suggests that AR can improve learning, knowledge retention, and accessibility, particularly when traditional approaches are impractical. Consequently, we integrated AR with a Lindsey robotic guiding system specifically designed to work in an open environment. Next, we tested the hypothesis that AR-enhanced robot guides improve learning and memory retention. A user study with 21 participants found that augmenting the robotic tour guide with AR can improve the learning outcomes of museum visitors.