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

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.