AR in museums: augmented reality to identify artwork

Museum uses augmented reality to identify 500+ works of art

Unofficial Uffizi AR app allows visitors to scan and instantly recognize artworks to reveal relevant information.

THE COMPANY

ItalyGuides is a travel website that offers a rich collection of more than 200 virtual panoramas of Italy’s most famous city monuments. These can be explored in 360° and come with text descriptions written by professional art historians. The company also provides free downloadable audio guides, high-definition videos, a 3000+ image gallery, and more.

THE CHALLENGE

  • Digitally identify paintings within a 500+ piece gallery
Tourists, visitors, and consumers are increasingly more demanding and are no longer satisfied with a simple visit. They wish to have exciting and engaging experiences. With this in mind, the company wanted to enhance its offerings with meaningful multimedia experiences. The challenge was to create a tool that could identify over five hundred works of art, regardless of where they were positioned in a gallery with one hundred exhibition rooms.

THE SOLUTION

  • AR app with Image Tracking capability
AR app: The unofficial guide to the Uffizi Gallery [ Google Play – App Store ] The unofficial Uffizi App allows visitors to scan and instantly identify any of the 500+ artworks on display. Once the Image is tracked, users have access to relevant information about the piece and artist. To work around the unstable mobile connection within the museum compound, the company used offline Image Tracking AR technology. This made the problem of identifying the correct artwork to reproduce the integrated info and audio guides easy and immediate. And also provided an enjoyable experience for the user during the museum visit.

THE RESULTS

  • More engagement & satisfaction during museum visits
Museum visitors using the AR app at the Uffizi Gallery do not need to search for artwork titles and descriptions to learn more about a specific artwork. Instead, they can easily identify pieces with a quick and simple scan using their smartphones. This innovative, helpful, fun, and interactive augmented reality experience has been very well received by museum visitors. Moreover, on a technical level and thanks to the remote administration system, the app can be continuously updated with new information. The company can easily add new artwork, update locations, new audio languages, and more.

THE AR APP DEVELOPER

  ComPart Multimedia is an experienced creative agency that offers the widest and most innovative forms of communication, from visual graphics to the latest multimedia systems. They have been working with Wikitude augmented reality technology since 2018.

THE AR TECHNOLOGY

  This AR feature is used to detect, track and digitally augment 2D images – ideal for augmenting customized image targets, magazines, books, user manuals, packaging, catalogs, coasters, gaming cards and much more.

Why Wikitude ?

The Wikitude AR platform was very easy to work with, and we were especially satisfied with the offline Image Tracking performance – essential to this project, as often times mobile connections are unreliable within large building compounds.
Daniele Ponte | CTO | ComPart Multimedia srl

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