Problem

Some museums are quite large and have content from many different fields. For example the Museum of Natural History in NYC has displays on animals, physics, and Ancient China. It’s easy to enter a museum and feel excited and overwhelmed, even with a museum map in hand; there is simply so much to see and sift through. Sometimes this leads to you wandering around the ancient history section walking past every pottery display in hopes of seeing cool prehistoric weapons.

Approach

This would be an app that will measure the amount of time you spend at a given exhibit (this will give curators an idea of how popular certain displays are) and provides a list of “other exhibits you might like” that updates when the app recieves new information. So if you are at a dinousaur exhibit but skip all of the chemistry exhibits, the app might suggest an exhibit on monkeys. The app would cross reference time spent with tags/keywords that curators associate with each exhibit. The suggestions could include a map showing current location and path the suggested display and maybe even a “how good was this suggestion?” (out of five stars).

I have no idea how to implement this app, I imagine each exhibit would need some sort of bluetooth signal to communicate with the app since apparently geolocation inside a building is hard and largely not accurate. The app would pick up the signal when the phone is within a certain physical distance and keep track of when it first picked up the signal and when it last picked up the signal. Again, I don’t really have a clue about how this would work and there is probably a better way of accomplishing this.

Audience

This tool would be useful for the average tourist or avid museum goer. It would also be of use to the curators of the museum so they can get a better idea of what types of displays are popular and maybe figure out why others aren’t so popular (maybe they are out of the way, in a typically crowded area, or surrounded by more popular displays).

Skills Needed

  • Someone who can make an app.
  • Someone artistically inclinded to help with graphics/design/mockups.