Mobile Phone Enabled Museum Guidance with Adaptive Classification

Although audio guides are widely established in many museums, they suffer from several drawbacks compared to state-of-the-art multimedia technologies: First, they provide only audible information to museum visitors, while other forms of media presentation, such as reading text or video could be beneficial for museum guidance tasks. Second, they are not very intuitive. Reference numbers have to be manually keyed in by the visitor before information about the exhibit is provided. These numbers are either displayed on visible tags that are located near the exhibited objects, or are printed in brochures that have to be carried. Third, offering mobile guidance equipment to visitors leads to acquisition and maintenance costs that have to be covered by the museum. With our project PhoneGuide we aim at solving these problems by enabling the application of conventional camera-equipped mobile phones for museum guidance purposes. The advantages are obvious: First, today’s off-the-shelf mobile phones offer a rich pallet of multimedia functionalities ---ranging from audio (over speaker or head-set) and video (graphics, images, movies) to simple tactile feedback (vibration). Second, integrated cameras, improvements in processor performance and more memory space enable supporting advanced computer vision algorithms. Instead of keying in reference numbers, objects can be recognized automatically by taking non-persistent photographs of them. This is more intuitive and saves museum curators from distributing and maintaining a large number of physical (visible or invisible) tags. Together with a few sensor-equipped reference tags only, computer vision based object recognition allows for the classification of single objects; whereas overlapping signal ranges of object-distinct active tags (such as RFID) would prevent the identification of individuals that are grouped closely together. Third, since we assume that museum visitors will be able to use their own devices, the acquisition and maintenance cost for museum-owned devices decreases

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Adaptive Image Classification on Mobile Phones

The advent of high-performance mobile phones has opened up the opportunity to develop new context-aware applications for everyday life. In particular, applications for context-aware information retrieval in conjunction with image-based object recognition have become a focal area of recent research. In this thesis we introduce an adaptive mobile museum guidance system that allows visitors in a museum to identify exhibits by taking a picture with their mobile phone. Besides approaches to object recognition, we present different adaptation techniques that improve classification performance. After providing a comprehensive background of context-aware mobile information systems in general, we present an on-device object recognition algorithm and show how its classification performance can be improved by capturing multiple images of a single exhibit. To accomplish this, we combine the classification results of the individual pictures and consider the perspective relations among the retrieved database images. In order to identify multiple exhibits in pictures we present an approach that uses the spatial relationships among the objects in images. They make it possible to infer and validate the locations of undetected objects relative to the detected ones and additionally improve classification performance. To cope with environmental influences, we introduce an adaptation technique that establishes ad-hoc wireless networks among the visitors’ mobile devices to exchange classification data. This ensures constant classification rates under varying illumination levels and changing object placement. Finally, in addition to localization using RF-technology, we present an adaptation technique that uses user-generated spatio-temporal pathway data for person movement prediction. Based on the history of previously visited exhibits, the algorithm determines possible future locations and incorporates these predictions into the object classification process. This increases classification performance and offers benefits comparable to traditional localization approaches but without the need for additional hardware. Through multiple field studies and laboratory experiments we demonstrate the benefits of each approach and show how they influence the overall classification rate.Die Einführung von Mobiltelefonen mit eingebauten Sensoren wie Kameras, GPS oder Beschleunigungssensoren, sowie Kommunikationstechniken wie Bluetooth oder WLAN ermöglicht die Entwicklung neuer kontextsensitiver Anwendungen für das tägliche Leben. Insbesondere Applikationen im Bereich kontextsensitiver Informationsbeschaffung in Verbindung mit bildbasierter Objekterkennung sind in den Fokus der aktuellen Forschung geraten. Der Beitrag dieser Arbeit ist die Entwicklung eines bildbasierten, mobilen Museumsführersystems, welches unterschiedliche Adaptionstechniken verwendet, um die Objekterkennung zu verbessern. Es wird gezeigt, wie Ojekterkennungsalgorithmen auf Mobiltelefonen realisiert werden können und wie die Erkennungsrate verbessert wird, indem man zum Beispiel ad-hoc Netzwerke einsetzt oder Bewegungsvorhersagen von Personen berücksichtigt

Phone-to-Phone Communication for Adaptive Image Classification

In this paper, we present a novel technique for adapting local image classifiers that are applied for object recognition on mobile phones through ad-hoc network communication between the devices. By continuously accumulating and exchanging collected user feedback among devices that are located within signal range, we show that our approach improves the overall classification rate and adapts to dynamic changes quickly. This technique is applied in the context of PhoneGuide – a mobile phone based museum guidance framework that combines pervasive tracking and local object recognition for identifying a large number of objects in uncontrolled museum environments

Introduction to location-based mobile learning

[About the book] The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning

Phone vs. Tangible in museums: A comparative study

Despite years of HCI research on digital technology in museums, it is still unclear how different interactions impact on visitors’. A comparative evaluation of smart replicas, phone app and smart cards looked at the personal preferences, behavioural change, and the appeal of mobiles in museums. 76 participants used all three interaction modes and gave their opinions in a questionnaire; participants interaction was also observed. The results show the phone is the most disliked interaction mode while tangible interaction (smart card and replica combined) is the most liked. Preference for the phone favour mobility to the detriment of engagement with the exhibition. Different behaviours when interacting with the phone or the tangibles where observed. The personal visiting style appeared to be only marginally affected by the device. Visitors also expect museums to provide the phones against the current trend of developing apps in a “bring your own device” approach

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project