The Talking Museum Project

In this paper, we present an ongoing project, named Talking Museum and developed within DATABENC - a high technology district for Cultural Heritage management. The project exploits the Internet of Things technologies in order to make objects of a museum exhibition able to "talk" during users' visit and capable of automatically telling their story using multimedia facilities. In particular, we have deployed in the museum a particular Wireless Sensor Network that, using Bluelooth technology, is able to sense the surrounding area for detecting user devices' presence. Once a device has been detected, the related MAC address is retrieved and a multimedia story of the closest museum objects is delivered to the related user. Eventually, proper multimedia recommendation techniques drive users towards other objects of possible interest to facilitate and make more stimulating the visit. As case of study, we show an example of Talking museum as a smart guide of sculptures art exhibition within the Maschio Angioino castle, in Naples (Italy). (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.