A mobile-based museum navigation system

• Main Author: Liu, Zheyong
• Other Authors: Owen Noel Newton Fernando
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66913
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Museums have long been facing the problem of providing appropriate and sufficient information about exhibits to visitors of the museum. With the rising popularity and pervasiveness of mobile devices, an intuitive solution would be a mobile application that are often equipped with cutting edge technologies such as Image Recognition and Bluetooth Low Energy to bring interactivity in museums to the next level. However, most mobile applications for museums utilizes only a single technology and utilizing only a single technology exposes the application to the disadvantages of that technology. Museums were often constrained by the disadvantages and existing applications do not enable the museums to fully rectify the problem without incurring certain drawbacks. The use of Image Recognition required good lightings, and hence do not allow lightings to be dimmed to reduce the damage done to exhibits that are sensitive to light and neither does it allow museums to create a special look and feel in the museum by varying different lighting intensities. The purpose of this project was to study and look at the disadvantages of current solutions implemented by museums and to propose and develop a new mobile application that aims to provide museums with a better solution to the stated problem. To achieve the purpose of the project, a literature review was conducted on several existing solutions to identify the current gap and research on possible improvements was conducted to address the gap identified. The proposed solution to the stated problem was a mobile application which integrates both Image Recognition and Bluetooth Recognition which was developed based on the research findings to address the current gaps. Various tests such as the determination of lighting condition and distance estimation using Bluetooth were carried out to test and verify the findings of the research and the design of the application. Additionally, the idea behind this solution could be extended to various other fields, such as any exhibits in the world and much more. The final part of this paper proposes the future recommendations and other possible applicability of this solution.