Fluid Interaction in Audio-Guided Museum Visit: Authoring Tool and Visitor Device

This paper presents an integrated system for location aware museum audio guide supporting sound spatialization. This system consists of a multi-modal visitor device composed of a head position, an orientation tracker and an audio headset. It aims at providing the visitor with a feeling of immersion within sounds virtually emanating from the artifacts exposed in the museum. The system is associated with a graphical authoring tool specifically designed for audio augmented reality in the context of museums. The proposed authoring tool enables to build the 3D representation of the museum, to add sound sources at different positions and altitudes, to build the virtual soundscape, and to create visitor scenarios describing how the visitor interacts with the soundscape while navigating through the museum artifacts. Experiments were conducted at the ’ Musée des Arts et Métiers’ in Paris, with the objective of reviving the machineries exposed at that museum by bringing to them the sound dimension from which they were deprived. The obtained results are very promising.