Leave your Smartphone in your Pocket
Visiting a museum is an experience full of wonder and surprise—an immersion into a new world. Visitors encounter an intriguing mix of the past and present, the imaginary and instructive, the virtual and the real. Today’s museum audience is increasingly more demanding—looking for content that is both informational and engaging. At the beginning of 2018, with funding from the Vienna Business Agency, NOUS launched a development project to address precisely this issue. The solution is NOUS Sonic a 3 dimensional, auditory, educational experience that lets the visitor leave their smartphone in their pocket.
All of this is made possible with the aid of extremely precise indoor localization that can pinpoint visitors to within just a few centimeters, which means that soundscape initializations can be accurate to the second.
Using a content management system, multimedia content flows are created that interactively accompany the visitors around the museum with content that is location- and context-specific. Imagine creatively conveying information about the artwork “The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Bruegel: the visitor walks up to the painting, a babel or a confusion of languages rises up, and then, as soon as they are immediately in front of the work, the cloud clears and the narrative description begins. Or perhaps a sound experience transforms a painting of Monet’s garden into a well-composed auditory image.
Entire exhibitions can now be experienced in sound or in multiple languages. This ultra-precise localization can also be used to read out the text of a label—in the selected language—at the very moment that the visitor reaches the artwork.
What makes all this possible is “ultra-wideband”—a vastly superior technology to WiFi, iBeacon, etc.