Towards Interactive Museum: Mapping Cultural Contexts to Historical Objects

In this paper, we present Interactive Museum Interface (IMI) which runs on a wearable computer. It allows people to efficiently and intuitively interact with historical objects in museums. Based on the IMI, the historical objects can be mapped to virtual icons containing cultural contexts as if making a shortcut icon in Desktop. A visitor can collect interesting contexts by pointing & selecting the virtual icons in the museum. In the IMI, the detection of users’ pointing objects is a challenging issue because the virtual icons are widely dispersed in the physical space. In order to devise IMI pointing device, we performed simulations of G-sensor modules to extract system parameters like as the sensor threshold and the maximum density of virtual icons. Based on the simulation results, we designed and implemented IMI framework which includes a wearable platform and a ring-type 3D pointing device.