ARCHIE: a Handheld Museum Guide Combining Location, Personalization and Communication to Support Socially Aware Group Visits

Abstract

In this paper we present ARCHIE, an interdisciplinary research project of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) and the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren (Province of Limburg), which aims to discover how a handheld guide can be used to enhance the museum learning experience. In ARCHIE we stress on the important role of social interaction as a prerequisite for intellectual, social, personal and cultural development. One of the main objectives of the ARCHIE project is to encourage and stimulate interaction with the museum, the PDA and fellow visitors. We created a framework that takes these three interaction channels into account and that supports the creation of arbitrary mobile guide shells. Designing a shell that incorporates social interaction is a real challenge however and asks for a new approach different from designing shells that pass information to the individual visitor.