Entrepreneurial Brainstorming Session: Augmented Museum Experience iPhone App
Hi, Vincent here. I have neither the intent, nor the talent to develop this application, but it was a thought/pain I experienced at a museum today and an iTunes search didn’t reveal an app like it.
A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!
Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.
Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.
- Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
- image recognition happens (how?),
- it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
- and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.
It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.
The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).
Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen
So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!
/Vincent
Tags: brainstorming, free information, museums, paintings, wikipedia
Apple, Art, Consumer electronics, Education, Entertainment, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Technology, Telecommunications, Web-services, augmented reality, copyright, innovation, media, mobile, mobile internet, virtual reality
Maybe you could get the museum to post a QR code with each piece (ie on the nametag?).
This could then redirect you to a web page (possibly internally hosted / available over local WiFi)
with embedded audio and other info;
could also have a 'spatial index' to let you jump to the next piece up/left/etc.
Hope this helps!
It does, because I don't know anything about image recognition.
But from a business +software perspective, having to make agreements with museums really inhibits the ability to scale a business.
I noticed that there was a simple cataloging app by Louvre for iPhone. Didn't test it out, but seems like it has some info about some of the things there. Pretty neat idea. Because I love the idea of iPhone etc. as an unified interface to the world, it would really make things simple if you could at a museum or a historic site, just plug your headphones into your smartphone instead of carrying around the audio tour things that expect you to walk at a given pace and route.
Well, I do know that there are research projects into this kind of stuff. You might have noticed in the news that Nokia has developed some image recognition app for movie posters. Also, I've heard that Nokia has a lot of interest in "indoor GPS" kind of things. So yes, I think this is something the mobile companies are interested, but I guess the problem is that they don't have a business case there. Museums on the other hand, might not have the know how.
From a technical point of view, some kind of smart tags would probably suit this idea best, if there was any client device adoption in that field. Things like RFID tags have the benefit of having low to no maintenance and giving you location information and close-range data transmission. Also, updating the info is quite easy as once you move the sign, the info moves… The other option is to use wlan or something, but then it gets quite messy.
I think the no cameras allowed rule has a lot to do with flash and the beeps that most people do not know how to disable. Also, I guess it depends on the country's copyright laws.
I don't think QR codes etc. are really appropriate in the museum context. First of all, it's quite a pain to get that close to the little signs.