Enhancing Museum Visitor Access Through Robotic Avatars Connected to the Web

Abstract

Access to cultural exhibits is a central issue in museums and exhibition galleries that is recently approached under a new, technological perspective. Although the cultural industries' practices in the cases of museums and cultural exhibits have remained practically unchanged for long, in recent years we are witnessing a gradual adoption of media-technologies in various aspects, such as collections archiving and digital document preservation, media- and Web-presentation, graphical animations, etc. The advent of such technologies contributes towards providing mediarich presentations of cultural exhibits and consequently offering better services to museum visitors. Lately, Internet and Web-based technologies have been employed for providing access, mostly to images of exhibited objects. With current technology such access is limited due to the non-interactive nature of pre-recorded images or videos and the difficulty in constant updating of the sites when there is change in the content. In few cases, the incorporation of higher-end technology, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or robotics, is explored. Some science museums, large "edu-tainment" venues, and recreation parks have traditionally been the ones to embrace new media first, by employing fascinating and sophisticated interactive installations and presenting up-to-date results on the creative use of technology.