(1692) MUSING: ENHANCING EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE THROUGH AN AUGMENTED REALITY/VIRTUAL MUSEUM APPLICATION

摘要

One of the roles of museums and art galleries is to educate about, and engage visitors with theartworks held within. Museums and galleries may provide historical, technical, biographical, andsociopolitical context to artworks: the most common format for this context comes in the traditional“tombstone” and text-based wall labels;;specialized audio/video guides;;or trained docents and staff.Often, these wall labels act as the only access point that visitors have to information about theexhibited objects or works. Text-based wall labels have space limitations, as well as an inability toprovide access to audio, video, Web services, and other information that could lead to furtherengagement. In addition, issues regarding accessibility arise when relying on traditional text-basedwall labels, as sight, height, and language are fixed.In the past few years, there has been a rise of the use of software applications that expand on theamount of information made available to visitors. Generally, applications for museums are proprietaryfor that museum and programmed specifically for each exhibition. As a result, whenever a newexhibition is installed, a new version of the software must be developed. In most of these cases, themuseums are required to supply proprietary hardware for check-out at the visitor's center, or installelectronic tokens, such as Bluetooth in the galleries. Developing custom applications for each exhibit,and supplying loaner hardware to visitors, can be both costly and inefficient. Moreover, the vastmajority of museums, specifically small to medium sized as well as regional and community venues,do not have the resources to create these costly systems.An interdisciplinary team from Texas State University has developed a smartphone application, calledMusing-an Augmented Reality application that allows the museum visitor to scan an artwork with asmartphone camera to gain additional information. Using image processing, the application recognizesthe artwork and places graphical user interface facilities in the form of points of interest (POI) over theartwork displayed on-screen. These POI provide the visitor with any combination of historical,technical, biographical, and sociopolitical information in the form of text overlays, audio, video, and/orWeb pages.Placing the points of interest over specific parts of the artwork, allows the museum professional toprovide additional information on specific aspects or sections of the artwork. In addition, Musing allowsusers to select artworks to keep in a personal archive by “favoriting” the works so that they can takethis information home with them to further study, use as a resource for scholarship, and share withothers in a variety of ways.