A Smart autonomous tour guide for museums

Abstract

For decades, worldwide museums posted text information about the displayed antiquities. This is done at most with only two languages. Also, they lack the interactivity factor which plays a key role in making the tourist interested to know more. In the past decade, efforts were spent to mitigate this issue by using a smart moving unit, usually a smart phone, where audio information can be listened to by the tourist. All information pieces are stored in the moving device. The problem becomes significant, when the antiquities to display are of a huge number and of extensive information. This, together with multiple languages becomes an impeding factor for moving unit of low or moderate storage capabilities. This paper proposes new design and implementation for a special purpose handheld device, with limited storage, capable of displaying different types of high-quality multimedia on an interactive screen of high resolution. This is resolved in this paper through employing a server, in which all antiquities database is stored. Firstly, the moving unit determines its location, sends its coordinates to the database server. Then, the latter determines the nearest antiquity to the moving unit and finally sends the antiquity's multimedia data to the moving unit to display. For moderate needed accuracy, long lifetime, ease of operation and cost effectiveness, Bluetooth Low-Energy beacons are used. Experimentation is conducted for verification. © 2019 IEEE.