Musing: Adaptable Mobile Augmented Reality Application for Museums and Art Galleries

Abstract

A fundamental goal of museums is to engage their visitors. For the uninitiated visitor, especially for those in an academic museum or gallery, art can be challenging, intimidating, and difficult to understand. Museums have historically used text-based didactics, hardware-based audio/visual guides and on-staff docents to provide historical, technical, biographical, and sociopolitical context for artworks. In the case of small museums, inexpensive text didactics are often the only source of information available to the visitor. Hence, these venues cannot take advantage of the audio, video, Web sites, and online resources that can enhance learning. The research team has developed an iPhone application, called Musing; an Augmented Reality application that allows a museum visitor to acquire artworks images via the iPhone’s camera. Using image processing algorithms, Musing recognizes the artwork and places point of interest widgets (POIs), in the form buttons, on top of the artwork displayed on-screen. These POIs provide the visitor with historical, technical, biographical, and sociopolitical information via audio, video, text overlays, and/or Web sites. Placing POIs over any part of an artwork allows the museum professional to provide contextual information that can help to create a meaningful experience for the visitor. The ability for the visitor to download Musing on their own phone reduces the costs associated with providing loaner hardware. Lastly, Musing’s Administrator Panel allows museum professionals with limited technical ability to build exhibits and add POI for use within the application.

Contributors

Kevin Whiteside

Gentry Atkinson

Mary Mikel Stump

Dan Tamir

Grayson Lawrence

Conference

Publication date: July 2014

Publication date (Print): July 2014

Pages: 229-236

Affiliations

Texas State University

601 University Dr., San Marcos, Texas, USA

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2014.56

Copyright statement: © Kevin Whiteside et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2014), London, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2014)

Conference acronym: EVA

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 8 - 10 July 2014

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2014)

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2014.56

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing