Augmenting Museums and Art Galleries

This paper is concerned with the application of context -aware computing to museums and art galleries. The paper reports three studies addressing this issue. The first study involved a survey of visitors to an art gallery and focused on visitor activity and information requirements. This led to the conclusion that one could define visitor types and relate these to the amount, and level of detail, of information for the visitor types. The second study involves a comparative evaluation of different platforms for augmenting museums and art galleries through physical hyperspace. The evaluation demonstrates that the approach is viable. The third study considers different media for presenting information to different user groups. British or Japanese students were presented with either textual or text + picture presentations of information. Differences in performance across groups and media were found. Implications for context -sensitive computing in museums and art galleries are discussed.