An Analytics System for the Evaluation of Interactions of Museum Visitors in Augmented Reality Tours

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system that supports the analysis of visitor interactions with augmented reality (AR) content in museum exhibitions. It can be used in conjunction with the AR authoring and presentation system InfoGrid. InfoGrid enables museum professionals to setup indoor and outdoor AR tours by connecting visual features of physical exhibits with different kinds of media. Visitors can retrieve these media by using the InfoGrid mobile app and scanning the target areas. The analytics application presented in this paper aims to help museum professionals to get an understanding of how visitors are using the AR tours they created. It shows how visitors interact with each AR element and reveals if some elements have been unrecognized. It allows museum professionals to visually inspect the data mapped onto a digital floor plan of the museum. The system visualizes movement paths on the floor plan as well as heatmaps that represent the overall time spent in an exhibit. Data for the evaluation system is anonymously generated by using a logging mechanism of the InfoGrid AR mobile app. Finally, we present a usability evaluation of the analytics system, discuss the results as well as future work.