A Mixed Reality Museum Guide: The Challenges and its Realization

Mixed Reality (MR) is an enabling technology for a much more interactive and intuitive experience of museum exhibits, that allows museum visitors to interact with pieces of art, without using complex virtual interaction metaphors. But MR applications for the museum domain must cope with a complex area of conflicts, which covers user acceptance, usability, copyright issues and technical feasibility. This paper describes the whole development process of a MR museum guide application for the Guggenheim Museum of contemporary art in Bilbao. An authoring-based production process, tailored to the specific requirements of MR is proposed, and its utilization for the realization of the Guggenheim MR museum guide is described. The presented authoring process is based on the AMIRE toolset, which comprises a set of tools to support the MR specific authoring tasks for authors who are not familiar with MR methodologies. The conventional programming based development process of MR applications is compared with the concepts proposed in this paper, in terms of cost efficiency, development time and maintainability. The problems arisen during the production process, discovered pitfalls and their mitigation are documented and discussed. These lessons learned during the production of the application found a basis for a set of “best practices” for authoring MR applications, especially when applying the MR technology to explore art exhibits.