Active Visitor: Augmenting Libraries into Social Spaces

摘要

Apart from their definitive role in the preservation of the treasures of human thought, libraries offer scientific, educative and entertainment services to their visitors. With the competition rising every day from various different sources, traditional or not, like the Internet, libraries should elevate their services in order to retain their position in an everyday changing world. Our contribution to the field of digital systems for libraries is Active Visitor, a system that offers both AR and social services to the visitors of a library. The system was designed taking into account the user requirements of library personnel and visitors. Active Visitor aims at the engagement of a library visitor through advanced AR services that permit book annotation through a mobile app and the sharing of such information at broader communities through specific social services. The system implementation is based on current AR technologies in order to offer services to library visitors through their smartphones. However, it can support modern wearable technologies like AR glasses which is the next step to the human computer interaction technologies. In order to stress the strength of the proposed system towards users’ satisfaction a quantitative and qualitative evaluation methodology is performed. Evaluation results suggest that the proposed system is an efficient attempt towards a system that transforms libraries into active digital social environments, while it offers a new avenue for additional revenue for libraries.