Page 248 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015248selling clothing, music, technology and other products. As it is a cheap technology based on proximity and is non-invasive, any institution can use it to broaden its range of services and offer users a new experience on the actual premises.From both an informative (providing further explanations and curious information aboutan artwork, location of the works by rooms, interactive maps and games, for example) and commercial point of view (being able to buy tickets, find out about offers, order a book, buy the catalogue on an artist on show, contact the store or other stores, etc.), beacons can offer visitors to or users of any cultural space a lotfor very little. What is more, beacons also allow users to interact socially with each other, and can therefore help institutions build the increas- ingly desirable communities of their own, apart from commercial brands.It can therefore be said that the advent of physical web technology of this kind, facial recognition, beacons, recommendation systems based on real satisfaction and interactive appli- cations, among other novelties, can provide cultural organisations with an impressive range of possibilities for enriching users’ experience, as well as allowing them to glean very significant information on visitors’ habits, on the roomsor works they stop to view for the longest, and on what information users value most highly, among other things.The National Museum Wales77 is reportedly the first national museum in the world to introduce beacons (in this case Apple iBeacons78). Some 25 iBeacons with varied digital content wereplaced around the museum to provide visitors with a new experience: different points of view and stories to broaden the information on the museum’s collections.The Groninger Museum was the first museum in the Netherlands to use this technology to transmit interactive content on physical objects shown in an exhibition held in March 2014, De Collectie,79 to smartphones and tablets. Beacons furthermore provided the museum with infor- mation on users’ interaction with physical objects in real time, as well as a detailed analysis of visitors’ movements inside the museum, enabling it to compile statistics on audiences’ interests and opinions. Visitors who did not bring their own device80 could hire a tablet from the museum in order to access the digital infor- mation provided by the beacons during their visit.Each exhibition room was installed with three beacons which, via tablet or smartphones, provided information on the works in the collec- tion, including photos, contextual information on the period of the artists featured in the exhibition, and audios and videos.Another foremost example is the Rubens House81 in Antwerp. In this case, iBeacons provide visitors with contextual information depending on their exact location in the muse- um, allowing them to progressively discover theFocus 2015. Museums and New Technologies