This paper describes Minerva, an interactive tour-guide robot that was successfully deployed in a Smithsonian museum. Minerva’s software is pervasively probabilistic, relying on explicit representations of uncertainty in perception and control. This article describes Minerva’s major software components, and provides a comparative analysis of the results obtained in the Smithsonian museum. Durin...

Moore Laboratory of Zoology and Department of Biology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA (JCH, ER) Department of Biological Sciences and Museum of Natural Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA (JEL, MSH) New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque, NM 87104, USA (DJH) Department of Integrative Biology and M. L. Bean Life Science Museum, Brigham Young...

The term ‘learning organisation’ is now a common feature of museum management discourse and, by implication, raises the issue of how a museum itself learns about approaches to ‘learning’. As ‘learning in museums’ becomes a major focus for many museums, clearly formulated and institutionally supported ideas about ‘learning’ should be an essential part of our role in interpreting natural and cult...

The Monash Museum of Computing History was established at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2001. This university museum has a growing collection of early computer equipment and a permanent exhibition tracing the development of computing technology within an Australian context and particularly related to computing at Monash University. The Museum has been evolving since its inception w...

An interactive museum exhibit of a digitally augmented medieval musical instrument, the tromba marina, is presented. The tromba marina is a curious single stringed instrument with a rattling bridge, from which a trumpet-like timbre is produced. The physical instrument was constructed as a replica of one found in Musikmuseet, a musical instrument museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. The replica instru...

This paper describes Minerva, an interactive tour-guide robot that was successfully deployed in a Smithsonian museum. Minerva's software is pervasively prob-abilistic, relying on explicit representations of uncertainty in perception and control. This article describes Minerva's major software components, and provides a comparative analysis of the results obtained in the Smithsonian museum. Duri...

Museums need an interactive data collection and visualisation tool for their artefacts. This paper describes a study in which we enable access to Chinese and Japanese cultural heritage information from two history museums, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and the Tokugawa Art Museum in Japan. Results from these museum databases were used to develop a prototype system to demonstrate advanced...

The paper examines the nature of school excursions to museums, and how the Internet, and in particular the web pages accompanying museum exhibitions, can be utilised to create authentic and complex learning environments for school students. The paper describes proposed research between a university and two leading museums that will investigate whether and how learners link web-based content and...

An Introduction to the Hunterian Museum. I passed through the regal Roman columns that grace the front entrance of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, England and collected my dark yellow “Museum Visitor” badge from a security guard at the front desk. Upon walking up the stairs to the second floor and then entering the museum, I was greeted by a volunteer working at the desk to the right, ...

We present our basic philosophy and concept of Tokyo University Digital Museum. The main goal of our activity is to propose new forms of museums of the future in which digital technologies support all kinds of museum activities such as gathering, preserving, researching, exhibiting, and educating about collections. Further, we report our novel digital technologies for the digital museum such as...