Augmented Reality Based Museum Guidance System for Selective Viewings

There have been several museum and exhibition guidance systems that are based on RFID and visual tags. Using these systems, additional information on the paintings and exhibits may be provided in the forms of text, image, speech, and video. However, at museums and exhibitions, many tourists are often interested in exhibits of some particular style, authors, or coteries. Previously developed guide systems do not provide such functionality to the best of our knowledge. The proposed Augmented Reality based guidance system may guide the users to exhibits of their interest for selective viewings. Location of the next exhibit of interest may be informed to the users as well as additional multimedia information on the exhibits of interest. Such information is shown on the Augmented Reality views of the user's display device. The proposed system is composed an Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC), an inertia tracker, and a camera. In the beginning, the user may select his/her preference on the exhibits from the menu, and then the system starts guiding by showing the relative orientation, distance, and visual cue to find match. When the user finds and locates the matching visual cue within a matching box of the display screen, the system provides multimedia information on the exhibit. According to the preliminary user test, the proposed system is convenient and useful for navigating through large-scale exhibitions.