Where can I find the famous painting of my favourite artist? What’s the quickest way to see the dinosaur exhibition? How does a historic steam train work? Find out more about indoor navigation apps in a museum and how augmented reality (AR) can enhance your indoor navigation experience.

A museum usually presents thousands of objects across thousands of square meters. This way it can provide its visitors with an active and engaging history through time. To encourage and enable your guests – especially children and young adults – VIEWAR helps to create a unique and immersive experience for your visitors.

Your mission: create a museum tour offering visitors an enhanced experience!

The highest discipline for your museum is to create an integral connection between historical objects and interactive elements. To gain more awareness and engagement, you can implement immersive augmented reality experiences. Furthermore, AR provides computer-generated images on a user’s view of the real world. This helps add value or information to the existing surrounding. By this, you can create a system for visitors to discover a certain topic using their mobile phone. With interactive experiences and exciting tours and programs the objects are about to come to live.

How augmented reality navigation works

So, where do you find the dinosaur exhibit in the museum? Scan the QR Code or start the app at the entry of the museum using your smartphone. Now start your individual or guided navigation through the whole venue. Get information about special objects, watch a video explaining the functionality of an item or look at an animation on how a machine used to work. Simply point the camera of your phone towards the object of interest. It will show you if additional information is available and let you browse through. No GPS tracking, no Wifi, no extra glasses needed.

Museum 4.0 – adding unique interactive experiences has never been so easy!

Augmented reality navigation for everyone!

With augmented reality (AR), visitors receive real-time additional information about an object when pointing at it with their camera phone. For example text descriptions, short references,  images and videos as well as breathtaking animations will enrich every visitors’ stay at the museum. Although it is a relatively new technology, indoor navigation apps in a museum offer various opportunities for guests to create a memorable experience when visiting the museum and its exhibitions. Therefore, it is an easy and innovative way for you to offer:

1. Additional information about objects

Content to enhance the experience of the visitor can be text, images, audio, video and animations. It can be retrieved from existing collection management systems. Subsequently, your visitor will see the information at the point of interest on the smartphone (location-based information). Also, the app offers text and voice translations for all available languages. The setting of your smartphone will decide the default language.

2. Easy wayfinding and navigation

Points of interest not only function as positions in tours, you can also navigate to them directly. For example for all your impatient visitors who don’t have time to do the whole journey. Or for your passionate car lovers who just want to see the dinosaurs.

3. Guided tours even in times of social distancing

Visitors can pick a guided tour of their interest. During the tour, they find the way on their own smartphone. Especially in times of social distancing and limitations to group-sizes. Now, you can still offer guided experiences in your venue and simply curate your own tours. With the INDOAR admin interface creating, editing, and managing tours is an easy task. 

4. Interactive tours

Guide your visitors with a 3D avatar. Our customizable guide can be the visitor’s personal museum guide. Additionally it can provide multilingual explanations!

5. Added value for visitors

Combine real world exhibitions with entertainment features on the most important device, the smartphone. As a result, create a unique experience for your museum visitors. Not only learning about the history of technology but also being entertained represents an added value and will certainly leave a good impression with your guests.

To sum up, you can create a hardware-free, indoor navigation system based on augmented reality. With VIEWAR you can create an amazing and easy to use AR experience for visitors. Add INDOAR to the physical world of your museum and let users literally step inside a virtual world with their smartphone. Find out how the Technical Museum in Vienna used our system to provide indoor navigation apps in their museum here >

Find out more about how to create an augmented reality App for indoor navigation in general.