Mobile Augmented Reality Guide for Museums

This project aims at the creation and real-world deployment of a handheld computer guide for museum visitors, based on Augmented Reality. A personal digital assistant (PDA) tracks the position of its user and provides context relevant information as a three-dimensional graphical overlay on a live camera image shown on the devices display. By looking "through" the display, visitors see visualizations and animations superimposed onto real exhibits. Project results will be demonstrated in a test exhibition of our partner museum. The knowledge associated with the test exhibition will be provided by a continuous information space, which is a seamlessly integrated virtual world that is aligned with the real interior of the museum. Every real exhibit is augmented by its virtual counterpart. The information space embeds all exhibits into a story and provides game mechanisms to carry visitors along in an exciting way. An important novel aspect is that the system will be tested in a real museum setting with a large number of simultaneous users. The proposers are an internationally recognised group, developing a leading AR platform that has recently been ported to a standalone PDA - a worldwide first. This approach makes AR much more ergonomic and cost efficient, and potentially allows commercial use. However, there is no previous case of commercial multi- user AR, and such a venture must therefore be considered too risky for commercial entities. Yet the scientific perspective of building and deploying a real world large scale AR installation is extremely intriguing from a human-computer interaction standpoint. We want to gain new insights and experiences for further research on mobile Augmented Reality that cannot be gained in the lab. The prototype will be suitable for industrial partners to further develop it into a marketable product after the project, bringing emerging technologies into everyday life.