Abstract

Augmented Reality has proven to be a motivating and engaging addition to museum exhibitions and cultural spaces within various research projects. It is not only capable of bringing long-forgotten artifacts and historical findings back to life but could also provide users with an engaging and immersive learning experience. At the same time, its cost-effective but interactive setup allows archaeological projects to take advantage of the intangible nature of AR systems and improve, complement, or even substitute selected aspects of an exhibition. At the same time, the progress made in the area of mobile device computing and its wide adaption among museum visitors opens up the opportunity for smaller museums to offer similar experiences without providing proprietary hardware or staff. The question of how feasible and effective this approach actually is will also run throughout this work and will be elaborated from various angles. Leading up to this work, scientists from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich have discovered and explored a Roman cargo vessel called "Istros," whose findings will be presented in an exhibition in the museum "Zeughaus" in the city of Augsburg. The presentation will be complemented by an AR-based mobile guide and made available for iOS devices via the Apple App Store. Besides a structured representation of findings and information, the mobile guide will also feature various AR scenes that convey a selection of details and concepts related to the vessel's construction and history in a virtual yet interactive way. Furthermore, the guide will collect analytical data to gather additional information about how users interact with the guide and the respective AR scenes. Moreover, these datasets will be complemented by surveys that users can choose to fill out to provide further background information. The goal of this paper will be to assess the feasibility of an unsupervised AR setup for smaller museums by presenting similar research done in this field and explaining the underlying setup of the final system while reiterating certain technical and organizational design decisions. In the second part, the paper will highlight the approaches taken to gather analytical data from the system and introduce the survey used for contextualizing these data sets. Finally, the paper will evaluate notable findings within the data and give a brief outlook on aspects to consider when integrating mobile AR systems into exhibitions for small museums.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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