Digital technologies are being introduced in museums and other informal learning environments alongside more traditional interpretive and communication media. An increasing number of studies has proved the potential of digitallymediated cultural heritage experiences. However, there is still a lot of controversy as to the advantages and disadvantages of introducing the digital into museum settings, primarily related to the risks and investment in terms of time, human and financial resources required. This work introduces the MUSETECH model, a comprehensive framework for evaluating museum technology before and after its introduction into a museum setting. One of the unique features of our framework is to consider the evaluation of digital technologies from three different perspectives: the perspective of the cultural heritage professional, the perspective of the cultural heritage institution and the perspective of the museum visitor. The framework benefited from an extensive review of the current state of the art and from inputs from cultural heritage professionals, designers and engineers. MUSETECH can be used as a tool for reflection, before, during and after introducing novel digital media resources. The model covers technologies as diverse as mobile museum guides, Augmented and Virtual Reality applications, hands-on museum interactives, edutainment applications, digitally-mediated tangible and embodied experiences or online approaches used for museum education and learning.
Providing engaging interpretation resources for museum and gallery visitors may have a great impact on the overall museum visiting experience all by assisting museums in maintaining long-term relationships with their public. This paper focuses on the ways through which AR can be employed in museum and gallery settings as an interpretation medium. It also introduces a new generation of multimedia guides for the museum visit inspired by the concept of Adaptive Augmented Reality (A2R). Adaptive Augmented Reality (A2R) provides visual and acoustic augmentations that come to supplement the artefact or site viewed by a museum or gallery visitor and monitors the cognitive and affective impact of all interactions of the museum visitor both with the physical and the digital environment. The ultimate goal is to make every museum visit unique, by tailoring an Augmented Reality visit with contents that are susceptible to increase the affective impact of the augmented museum visiting experience and hence encourage intrinsic and self-motivated learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.