Museums, Artefacts and Cultural Heritage Sites

Abstract

The relationships between museums, artefacts and original sites are complex. How may we use mobile augmented reality (AR) to bridge the gaps between both indoors and outdoors exhibitions as well as the opposition between central collections and the more peripheral sites of the original artefacts? In this paper we present two main cases (the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and the Calmecac Museum in Mexico City) where we have experimented with bringing a digital copy of the displaced artefact back to its original environment, as well as bringing a digital copy of the original environment into the displaced or isolated object in the museum exhibition. Further, we report on a solution to solve the problem with indoor positioning (IPS) and how it can be seamlessly combined with GPS–based outdoor positioning for smooth transitions between inside and outside. Finally, these cases were tested with three different hardware platforms - tablets, smartphones and smartglasses.