| The experience of visitors in exhibition areas is a key factor for the success of the endeavor and it can be considerably enhanced by using modern digital technologies and tools. Among others, the experience is affected by the number of visitors in the exhibition area, making the indoor crowd management a challenging topic which cross cuts several scientific areas. Various methods have been developed to overcome this issue especially in museum exhibitions where even a few visitors beyond a certain threshold may completely obstruct the view of the exhibits and ruin the experience. Latest technological advancements include the ability of mobile devices and microprocessors to perform even heavier tasks in executing complex algorithms and data processing by utilizing the state of the art sensors and hardware components of the mobile devices. In this work we present a crowd management algorithm and a prototype system for a museum exhibition which operates at the edge of the network utilizing the mobile devices as execution environments. As part of the prototype, we propose the integration of a series of serious games that are supplementary to the exhibits and have the goal of delaying the user before continuing to a next sector of the exhibition, acting in parallel as digital tools for education and information sharing for the various exhibits. The crowd monitoring is achieved by utilizing the localization ability of Augmented Reality - AR with Cloud functionality for mobile phones. Moreover, AR can be used in the aforementioned serious games to offer a seamless experience by combining the exhibition site with additional content. Algorithms for “visitors flow management”, “visitor routing” and “room exploration” are introduced and extensively described and a Cloud AR Management Platform is developed for manipulating all the system aspects. |
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