Person-oriented guided visits in a physical museum

The "ideal guided visit" to a space (as an exhibition, a museum, an open-air exposition distributed in different areas of a city, an archaeological site and so on) allows the visitor to organise the tour throughout the different areas according to their own needs or preferred criteria: for example, looking for paintings coming from the same geographical region rather than paintings produced in the same period (following a geographical thread rather than a chronological one). However, when organising the physical layout of the exposition areas a specific criterion for items placement has to be chosen, according to a "default" perspective of information presentation, either chosen by an architect or imposed by geographical constraints. It may happen that the default physical organisation does not meet directly the visitor's expectations, possibly making it difficult to build a personal route. We shall discuss the development of a system able to organise the presentation of a museum contents taking into account the visitor's needs and the layout of the physical space. The system guides the visitor through the museum and provides information by means of audio messages: the visitor can get instructions for finding the objects of interest, hear descriptions with references to other interesting objects in the museum, ask for additional information and receive suggestions on next steps. Therefore, the visitor is provided with a personalised guide for exploring the physical and information space.