Personalizing Virtual and Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage Indoor and Outdoor Experiences

Abstract

Most cultural heritage exhibitions, both indoor and outdoor, could benefit from context-aware and personalized museum guides. Although, technological advancements in digitization, digital storage, visualisation and interaction have evolved rapidly, the current generation of museum exhibition and mobile guides offer systems with restricted capabilities and content, for example user selected audio guides and interactive touch screen kiosks. This paper presents solutions for both museum exhibitions and mobile guides moving towards a unifying framework based on open standards. This can offer more customisable experiences attracting and engaging a broader spectrum of users. Our solution takes into account the diverse needs of visitors to heritage and mobile guide exhibitions allowing for multimedia representations of the same content but using diverse interfaces including a web, a map, a virtual reality and an augmented reality domain. Different case studies illustrate the majority of the capabilities of the multimodal interfaces used and also how personalisation and customisation can be performed in both kiosk and mobile guide exhibitions to meet user needs.