Indoor positioning in cultural heritage: Challenges and a solution

Museums are both appealing and challenging as an environment for research with novel mobile technology. Over the years, quite a few research projects explored the potential of novel technologies to support information delivery to museum visitors. Having an accurate visitor position and orientation is a key factor in the success for offering an interesting and personalized experience to visitors. Unlike outdoors positioning, in spite of numerous technologies experimented with, there is no prevailing indoor positioning solution. Each technology has its benefits as well as its limitations. In addition, museums have their own constraints when it comes to installation of equipment in their space. In the framework of the PIL project, a flexible 'light weight' proximity based indoor positioning system was developed and deployed at the Hecht museum, at the University of Haifa. The positioning system was subject to the inherent limitations of the basic measurement technology. The implementation proposes a general framework for indoor positioning addressing these limitations by an abstract reasoning layer supported by a dialog with the user that is seamlessly integrated into a museum visitors' guide system.