Augmented Reality applied to Museum Gallery Maps
Augmented Reality (AR) can play a more significant role in enhancing the visitor experience and education in museums. AR allows a robust implementation of active learning, rather than traditional passive learning, through its virtual engagement (Challenor and Mia 2019). One way museums can reach out to the technology field in creating memorable visitor experiences is through AR. AR involves overlaying visual, auditory, or other sensory information in the real world, typically with a smartphone. In this blog post, I examine the use of AR to improve visitor engagement with museum gallery maps.
Museum gallery maps typically showcase a layout of the museum’s floor space and help guide visitors. Maps usually are designed to be user-friendly and can provide information about current exhibitions and amenities in the institution. Most often, maps are a physical piece of paper. Many museums use maps within their museum apps. Examples include the Louvre, The British Museum, and The Panhandle Plains Museum (Hanussek 2020). The use of virtual maps within applications can allow for AR elements to be implemented into the app software and the continued use of physical copies of maps.
The Museum of Texas Tech University has an existing printed-out gallery and museum amenities map located at the front entrance kiosk for visitors to grab and use to help navigate through the gallery spaces. The Museum of Texas Tech University has many different galleries and collections that range from Paleontology, Art, Clothing and Textiles, Native American Pottery, and many more. The current map shows a simple blueprint layout of the museum building with text and color coding. The text on the map lists the names of the galleries, however, titles such as changing world and Diamond M gallery are vague titles that need to convey the gallery’s contents fully. The color coding on the current map shows which galleries are long-term or permanent galleries, which galleries are changing exhibitions, and where specific amenities are located, such as the auditorium and offices. A map is an excellent tool for visitors, however, I wanted to add an AR experience to the map to make it more fun to showcase what was in each gallery.
Creating an Augmented Reality Museum Visitor Map
The AR museum map was created using Reality Composer, an Apple AR design app available on iOS or macOS through Xcode. In Reality Composer, users first create an anchor for their project to attach their AR scene: horizontal, vertical, image, or object. I selected the image anchor since I am adding AR elements to the museum gallery map, an image anchor. After choosing the type of AR experience, I wanted to create, I searched for objects to animate.
I started by walking through all of the galleries in the museum to get a feel for what objects could represent each gallery’s content. For my project, I used a mixture of Reality Composer’s premade objects, SketchFab downloads, and objects created in Photocatch. The Reality Composer App has pre-loaded AR objects from many categories. The categories include basic shapes, activities, arts, education, food, nature, furniture, and many more. Sketchfab and other resource websites provide already-developed downloadable 3D models to create AR experiences. For museums, you could download a 3D AR model of a T-Rex, a mammoth, a sarcophagus, a blue whale, or anything you think represents part of your museum collection. Another option for objects to place in your AR experience would be to create 3D models of objects directly from your collection. To develop objects from one’s collection, simply taking a few images of the object from many angles and imputing it into an app such as Photocatch can create quick and easy high-quality models to input into AR projects. I created AR elements of art pieces and signs around the museum using Photocatch.
After I gathered all the 3D AR objects, I placed them on the map in the galleries that corresponded with their objects. Examples of a few gallery objects and the corresponding gallery include a T-Rex in the Paleontology gallery, an Art Piece from the permanent collection in one of the Art galleries, and a Coyote in the Natural Life Science gallery. After I matched the galleries to an animated AR object, I animated each object.
Conclusion
Augmented Reality (AR) in museums can enhance visitor engagement by offering a visual learning experience accessible to anyone with a smart device. QR codes can provide links to AR experiences that can be placed around the museum or in the form of a map. AR can supplement traditional museum education tools such as text and physical objects, providing another learning style for visitors to exercise. The accessibility and easy creation process of creating AR experiences make the reality of AR experiences in a museum attainable and beneficial to the visitor experience.
