Museum visitors usually seek to gain as much information as possible about certain objects or exhibitions. However, they often need help finding the right item or navigating quickly to their desired destination. Therefore, museum navigation systems are essential for on-the-move assistance, indoor positioning, and wayfinding.

In this context, this article describes how VIEWAR powers the museum navigation project at the Technical Museum Vienna (TMW) using Augmented Reality for localization and positioning.

Objective and scope of services needed

The Technical Museum in Vienna aimed to implement an indoor positioning system to enhance wayfinding and offer personalized tours for visitors. By using their smart devices (smartphones or tablets), guests would be able to accurately locate specific objects and navigate the museum with ease. This system employs Augmented Reality (AR) for wayfinding, using the device’s camera to guide users toward objects. To facilitate this navigation and positioning, the museum required a 3D scan of the entire venue, which spans approximately 22,000 square meters (236,800 square feet).

With the navigation system, the museum’s 12,000 exhibition objects could be precisely located and either directly navigated to or included in various tours. Moreover, item-specific information would be displayed when a visitor points at the correct element. This information could include text, images, audio, or video and would be retrieved from the museum’s existing collection management system, Adlib.

The navigation system was to be integrated into a custom-developed app for the museum. Additionally, a 2D museum map would be available on the museum’s website, highlighting points of interest, exhibitions, individual objects, and important checkpoints.

Problem

Indoor navigation solutions for mobile devices are becoming more common and accepted for people wanting to find destinations inside a building. Many indoor positioning and navigation applications often use hardware, such as bluetooth beacons and ceiling antennas. Such hardware installations are expensive and need to be maintained. Bluetooth beacon based solutions would only be able to provide an accuracy of 5-8 meters which is not enough for a museum. 

Solution

VIEWAR is deploying a vision-based positioning system using Augmented Reality techniques for indoor navigation. More precisely, VIEWAR uses the visual recognition method to calculate visitor position, Augmented Reality to display real-time information and an interactive guide to show the navigation destination direction.

VIEWAR partners with TMW to create and enhanced visitor experience

The IT agency Jart who won the tender for the application was looking for options for the indoor positioning. Among other technologies, VIEWAR has presented their AR based approach and was chosen as the system for the AR component. 

Jart created an application for the TMW that uses the VIEWAR SDK for the positioning and navigation. 

Using the TMW App, visitors can choose one or more Points of Interest (POIs) and will be guided to the destination by the VIEWAR system. To start the navigation, the user films the surrounding area to do the positioning and is then guided towards the chosen POI or POIs. Once at the Point of Interest, the app offers further information for interaction. This approach helps visitors to create personalized tours or use already existing tours guiding them through various exhibitions and objects of the museum. Using Augmented Reality, interactive content can also be offered at the point of interest.

The location was scanned by Beko, who used a Matterport Pro3D Scanner, in order to produce a scan of the location. The scan of the entire floor space of about 22.000m2 took 5 days. The project was finalized and successfully implemented into the Museum App in April 2021.

Conclusion

“Indoor navigation with Augmented Reality offers a unique solution for an advanced and entertaining visitors’ experience at our museum”, says Dr. Walter Szevera from the TMW. “No matter if our visitors want to take a guided tour or get more information about an exhibition object. With this solution we are able to provide such added values to our guests!”

Augmented Reality offers many interactive solutions involving visitors and creating rewarding engagement opportunities during their stay in the museum. The indoor navigation system by VIEWAR opens up an immersive world of experiences, information, video, AR-content and guided tours, to enable an unforgettable stay at the Technical Museum in Vienna.

If you’re interested in creating indoor navigation for visitors in your museum or exhibition, contact us!

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