Passive Profiling and Natural Interaction Metaphors for Personalized Multimedia Museum Experiences

Museums must balance the amount of information given on individual pieces or exhibitions in order to provide sufficient information to aid visitor understanding. At the same time they must avoid cluttering the environment and reducing the enjoyment of the exhibit. Moreover, each visitor has different interests and each might prefer more (or less) information on different artworks depending on their individual profile of interest. Finally, visiting a museum should not be a closed experience but a door opened onto a broader context of related artworks, authors, artistic trends, etc. In this paper we describe the MNEMOSYNE system that attempts to provide such a museum experience. Based on passive observation of visitors, the system builds a profile of the artworks of interest for each visitor. These profiles of interest are then used to personalize content delivery on an interactive table. The natural user interface on the interactive table uses the visitor’s profile, a museum content ontology and a recommendation system to personalize the user’s exploration of available multimedia content. At the end of their visit, the visitor can take home a personalized summary of their visit on a custom mobile application. In this article we describe each component of our approach as well as the first field trials of our prototype system built and deployed at our permanent exhibition space at Le Murate in the city of Florence.