Augmented Reality Museum Guide

Museums tend to have a conservative exhibition style. And, many museums maintain permanent displays and exhibitions that have been static for many years. Therefore, updating or overhauling the physical narrative to these displays can be a costly and time-consuming process.

Nonetheless, a substantial number of institutions understand the importance of modernizing exhibits to better connect with the present-day public.

The boom in the number of museums and attendance has doubled in the last 50 years. Museums are competing and with other venues and attractions. Plus, museum visitors have become more demanding and interested in having a unique museum visiting experience that’s tailored to their individual needs.

The evolving demands of museum visitors, the opening-up of museums to their public and the chase for an even more personalized museum visiting experience has set up new challenges.

Augmented reality technology can step in. AR allows users to see an extra layer of digital content on top of real-world scenarios, and forward-thinking museums can adopt this technology. AR can allow visitors a richer view and fuller understanding of the origins, history, and details of objects on display.

Many museums operate in niches. People who choose to visit a specific museum are likely to be genuinely interested in the specialized topic—these are the visitors who will decidedly benefit from the extra layers of augmented information.

What lies ahead for the museums of the future? With the constant advancements of Augmented Reality, AR hardware and software processing capacity, the possibilities to create things that are beautiful, intriguing, interesting and of value are endless.

Museums and cultural institutions can use Edge Realities to leverage the power of augmented reality to create unforgettable experiences with new and richer ways of engaging their visitors. Edge Realities and AR experiences can give static museum displays the occasion to incorporate movement, dynamism, and interactivity.

A prominent feature of Edge Realities is that any computing is fully outsourced, making it easy to map and add digital overlays to large or small-scale environments. Thanks to this mapping feature, we can realize the challenge of making hundreds of images and stories in a museum connected, interactive and ultimately: accessible.

To engage and add to the museum experience, Edge Realities can offer unlimited possibilities.

It can allow museums to investigate ways to augment a visitor’s current interpretation by offering virtual storylines as well as bringing artifacts to life by adding digital layers of 2D graphics, video, or 3D animations. These overlays can be placed virtually onto the museum’s physical objects, and anyone can visualize the provided augmented reality content using our device-agnostic system.

In this way, visitors will get more detailed information when they view exhibitions, and our solution gives opportunities to add a third dimension to displays, reinvent entire galleries, and bring objects or scenes to life.

Visitors try to gain knowledge as much as they can during their visit, and they often require help in finding the desired objects while wandering around a large museum. Instead of studying maps, a visitor can use our system to smoothly find their way to a specific exhibit or location.

Edge Realities can allow a visitor to set up their own personalized tour. Or, they can choose from a set of pre-defined tours focusing on a specific topic. We can create an animated avatar to guide visitors through the museum to tell stories related to the objects on display.

Edge Realities can turn education into didactic entertainment via interactive AR gaming experiences for young visitors. Another type of interaction may be an AR questionnaire to ask visitors to rate their experience. What’s more, art not seen that is in museum storage can be virtually displayed for public viewing.

Another significant benefit is Edge Realities allows for multi-user experiences. AR can add family-friendly games to a museum space to provide an interactive experience that visitors can enjoy together.

Further, our solution can help any museum enhance merchandising. As people leave, they can visit the museum shop to buy a book or poster of famous artwork that has an integrated augmented reality experience. Or they might visualize information about the artworks through AR or a flashback to the museum that showcases a video of key objects. That is certainly merchandise with added value.

Especially when trying to capture the attention of various generations, the Edge Realities solution for museums can help boost the visitor experience, provide diverse ways of involving people and create rewarding engagement opportunities.

“We have been collaborating with 1000 realities for about three years since 2019. Their product “Edge Realities” and its distinctive mapping feature, great scalability, and power to transmit large amounts of persistent data with low latency have helped us provide high-quality augmented reality experiences to prove the value of MEC (Multi‐access Edge Computing) on the 5G network.

1000 realities has proven to be a reliable tech partner, and we hope other business enterprises try their Edge Realities system. We are grateful for 1000 realities and the great job they have done so far!”

NTT Docomo