Museo Multiverso: Bridging the gap between museums and mobile platforms

Abstract

As mobile devices have pervasively become virtually available to all, cultural institutions have been increasingly investing resources in the creation of apps that can be enjoyed on the phone. Typically such apps are built custom for specific events or exhibitions, resulting in increased IT costs that well exceed the typical costs due to the maintenance of institutional websites and the carry on of traditional marketing strategies. In this paper we describe Museo Multiverso (MuMu), a mobile publishing platform that provides a standard interface with the mobile world to museum curators and experts. Using MuMu a museum curator can populate a mobile client with any multimedia information related to an exhibition or to a network of exhibitions and easily publish such information and make it available to mobile users. MuMu is composed of two main components: a platform that museum curators can use to organize and insert the information they want to share with the public and a mobile client where users can originally enjoy all of such information. In fact, the contribution of this work is twofold: (a) from an architectural point of view, we designed and implemented a platform that can be put to good use to support virtually any number of museums and events, and, (b) from a human-computer interaction point of view we leverage on advanced interaction techniques in order to provide an easy to use interface that excites curiosity and interest.