14,104 research outputs found
Promising Beginning? Evaluating Museum Mobile Phone Apps
Since 2009 museums have started introducing mobile apps in their range of interpretative media and visitor services.
As mobile technology continues to develop and permeate all aspects of our life, and the capabilities of smart phones
increase while they become more accessible and popular, new possibilities arise for cultural institutions to exploit these
tools for communicating in new ways and promoting their exhibitions and programmes. The use of mobile apps opens
up new channels of communication between the cultural institution and the user, which extent to his or her personal
space and go beyond the boundaries of the museum’s walls. The paper presents a survey carried out of mobile apps
designed by art or cultural historical museums and analyses the wider issues which are raised by the findings. It
discusses, among others, the kind of use these apps were designed to fulfil (e.g. the majority are guided tours to the
permanent collections or to temporary exhibitions), the layering of content,and the type of user interaction and
involvement they support
Augmented Reality in Astrophysics
Augmented Reality consists of merging live images with virtual layers of
information. The rapid growth in the popularity of smartphones and tablets over
recent years has provided a large base of potential users of Augmented Reality
technology, and virtual layers of information can now be attached to a wide
variety of physical objects. In this article, we explore the potential of
Augmented Reality for astrophysical research with two distinct experiments: (1)
Augmented Posters and (2) Augmented Articles. We demonstrate that the emerging
technology of Augmented Reality can already be used and implemented without
expert knowledge using currently available apps. Our experiments highlight the
potential of Augmented Reality to improve the communication of scientific
results in the field of astrophysics. We also present feedback gathered from
the Australian astrophysics community that reveals evidence of some interest in
this technology by astronomers who experimented with Augmented Posters. In
addition, we discuss possible future trends for Augmented Reality applications
in astrophysics, and explore the current limitations associated with the
technology. This Augmented Article, the first of its kind, is designed to allow
the reader to directly experiment with this technology.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap&SS. The final
publication will be available at link.springer.co
Authoring and Living Next-Generation Location-Based Experiences
Authoring location-based experiences involving multiple participants,
collaborating or competing in both indoor and outdoor mixed realities, is
extremely complex and bound to serious technical challenges. In this work, we
present the first results of the MAGELLAN European project and how these
greatly simplify this creative process using novel authoring, augmented reality
(AR) and indoor geolocalisation techniques
VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases
Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve
free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an
effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed
in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication
capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices.
Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of
transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not
only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user
extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and
specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the
emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this
evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are
adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric
view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of
emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We
identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car:
paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through
different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of
the user within an intelligent and efficient driving
Studienlandschaft Schwingbachtal: an out-door full-scale learning tool newly equipped with augmented reality
This paper addresses education and communication in hydrology and geosciences. Many approaches can be used, such as the well-known seminars, modelling exercises and practical field work but out-door learning in our discipline is a must, and this paper focuses on the recent development of a new out-door learning tool at the landscape scale. To facilitate improved teaching and hands-on experience, we designed the Studienlandschaft Schwingbachtal. Equipped with field instrumentation, education trails, and geocache, we now implemented an augmented reality App, adding virtual teaching objects on the real landscape. The App development is detailed, to serve as methodology for people wishing to implement such a tool. The resulting application, namely the Schwingbachtal App, is described as an example. We conclude that such an App is useful for communication and education purposes, making learning pleasant, and offering personalized options
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