How Technology is Changing Museum Experience.

Strolling through the Louvre or Smithonian museum can be overwhelming. They showcase thousands of exhibits, ancient artifacts, and galleries from every corner of the world. That’s why it is usually recommended for visitors to join walking tours led by a knowledgeable guide. But that may change soon. With the rise of new technology and smartphones in the palm of everyone, visitors can now have access to infinite resources and information to enhance their museum tour experience. 

The new technology movement that started with e-commerce and changed the retail landscape is now changing a wide variety of other fields, such as transportation and hospitality. For instance, Airbnb is changing how we think about hotels and lodging, and services like Uber and Lyft are changing how we think about transportation.

The advent of technology has definitely led to some changes in how museums are operated. Most of those changes, however, have taken place behind the scenes. That is, the internal and archiving side of museums may have been addressed by new tech companies; the public side is still the same way that it was 50 years ago. For example, a museum’s internal tours, translations, audio description devices, donations, and visitor interaction and overall communication have undergone few or no changes. With so much technology now available, should we really be content with what was available in the past?

Today's new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, and mobile devices, can provide a great opportunity for the museum industry to change how it interacts with visitors’ tour experience. It can be done through agile mobile and web-based apps. And this is where Webreed comes into play. 

Webreed is an artificial intelligence(AI) powered platform that helps museums by expanding their online presence and changing how they interact with visitors. There are several built-in interactive features that help visitors better navigate through museums, and fully immerse themselves in art and history. Let’s take a closer look at them:

2D & 3D Collection Gallery

The 360° image technology allows museums to create 2D and 3D online galleries or even 360° photos of a single artifact with a push of a button on any smartphone or DSLR camera.

Multi-language Translator 

Using AI and Neural Network technologies, visitors receive an auto-translate description in 32 different languages and even a personal tour in the language of their choosing. This is all done with no equipment necessary except their mobile devices. 

Indoor Navigation System 

There is an offline/online navigation system that can act as a Google map for an indoor museum experience by helping visitors navigate through the collection. It helps improve the visitor experience and reduces the number of customer service members. The data collected form this process offers valuable insight as a heatmap to museum staff.

Scan & Bookmark

With QR code technology, visitors can tap their phone or scan artifacts to read descriptions or bookmark them for later viewing. This feature offers higher traffic for museums and a better flow of visitors. There is also a communication platform that allows museum admins to send notifications to visitors’ smartphones, even after they leave the museum. 

All of these features are designed to improve visitors’ tour experience, increase traffic within museums, save museum administrators time and money, and generate more donations. We intend to introduce a radical and improving change to the museum landscape through technology and simplify tasks to make it easier for people to connect with the world’s rich heritage in art, history, and culture.