The Art of Automatic Identification: Enabling The Museum of The Future

Smart solutions are enhancing the management and experience of art galleries and museums…and even becoming a part of the artist’s palette for creating works of art.

Introduction: Enhancing Visitor Experiences and Museum Management

Museums around the world are taking giant steps toward discovering how RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) can enhance the visitor experiences viewing art and exhibits. In doing so, they are finding new ways to provide a “value-add” to the museum experience – continuing it over time, while also simultaneously collecting valuable information for their own operations.

The Tech Museum of Innovation (The Tech) in San Jose, California is quite appropriately a leader in the use of RFID to enhance the guest experience, both during and after their visit to the center. When a visitor enters The Tech, they are given a “TechTag,” a pre-printed, human readable wristband that contains a pre-encoded Hitachi µ-chip. During their visit to The Tech, guests wave their wristbands in front of RFID readers at select exhibits to trigger various interactive experiences.

Other American science museums have also begun implementing RFID-enabled exhibits to enhance the visitor experience. In 2001, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry opened a permanent exhibition, “NetWorld,” dedicated to the Internet. Within the exhibit, visitors use NetPasses, until recently small cards with embedded Bistatix RFID chips, which in late 2006 will become LED glow-in-the-dark necklaces with Rafsec RFID chips embedded on them. TagSense sensors in the exhibition detect the presence of RFID NetPasses and call over a digital buddy to interact with visitors to foster learning about bits, bandwidth, and packet switching. Visitors can have pictures of their faces pasted onto their personal avatars so that they “live” forever in the exhibition. These dynamic animations personalize the experience and are always associated with their unique NetPass. Avatars “pump up” in body shape as visitors use their NetPass and are created without the visitor having to disclose any personal information. A similar card-based RFID system has recently been installed at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

Encouraging Repeat Visits

All three science museums’ systems provide the ability for the visitor to continue their experience with the respective museum beyond that day. For example, visitors returning to NetWorld with their NetPasses are “remembered” and their personal avatar appears again. The Tech, meanwhile, encourages visitors to retain their TechTag wristbands as a souvenir. They can then use their unique ID code (which contains no personal information) to log onto their own personal website, which has a record of their personal visit to The Tech, offering additional online content to extend their museum experience. Repeat visitors to The Tech are encouraged to bring back their TechTags to add to their personal webpage as new and visiting exhibits are added to the museum. Likewise, the system at San Francisco’s Exploratorium allows visitors to not only view the static exhibits and research additional online content, but to view photographs from the day of their trip to the museum and records of any experiments they undertook while visiting the center, such as patterns of ice crystals they created in an interactive exhibit on crystals.

Visitor reaction is noted to be overwhelmingly positive to such use of RFID technology to enhance and continue the visitor experience. As Grace, a 9 year-old visitor to The Tech commented, “I made my own webpage. It made the museum just for me.” Likewise, after field trips to these museums, schoolteachers are finding the continuing connections to be a great tool to spark students’ continued learning after these class outings and to facilitate the completion of post-visit assignments.

Tagging Visitors

While museum visitors undoubtedly enjoy value-added benefits from RFID-equipped exhibits, the value of tagging both the art and the patrons in a museum creates a dream scenario for museum management. In retail today, outside of a few test locations and laboratories, it is impossible to tag both the customer and the merchandise to analyze how they move through the store and how they interact with the focal objects. However, leading art museums in the US, including both the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, have pilot-tested RFID in select exhibits have also begun using similar RFID-based exhibits. However, both major art museums are in the midst of major renovations to be completed by 2010, and in addition to enhancing patron experiences, the exhibits provide theirs and other museums using RFID-based systems with RFID-equipped cards, necklaces or wristbands with unparalleled levels of consumer behavior data.

For instance, they can detect visitor traffic patterns to see how they progress through the museum, whether individuals or groups differ in how they make their way through the exhibits, and which items are more heavily viewed or lightly visited – and for how long – by patrons. This invaluable data can help create displays and pathways through both individual exhibits and the museum as a whole to improve and augment their visitor experiences. As Steve Peltzman, MOMA’s chief information officer recently stated, “We want to enhance the art, not supplant it.”

The RFID in museum phenomenon is by no means exclusively an American one. Indeed, at the Museum of Natural History in Aarhus, Denmark, visitors to the “Flying” exhibit receive PDAs at the entrance and choose one of three modes in which to view the fifty birds on display, all of which are embedded with RFID tags. In the encyclopedia mode, a patron can access information on the bird they are viewing from the museum’s website, including multimedia clips and quizzes on the animal. In the theme mode, the PDA can guide the visitor’s path through the exhibition according to a number of themes, including “Wings,” “Birds” or “Airplanes.” Finally, in the game mode, visitors are challenged to correctly locate specific birds in the exhibit, based on series of clues provided to them on their PDA, which can then not only inform them of their progress in the game, but track their game play versus other patrons. As each visitor has to create an account and log-in to use the RFID-enabled features of the exhibit, a record is created of their specific visit. Guests can continue their interaction with the exhibit by logging onto the museum’s website after their visit. The visitor data is also of great value to the museum, as it allows exhibit curators and museum administrators to gain a great deal of insight into how their patrons actually interacted with the displays (how long at each item, order of viewing, items skipped, and so on). This allows for the museum to thoughtfully reconfigure the exhibits and add/delete items, based on this non-obtrusive manner of gathering consumer feedback on its offerings.

Managing Art and Museum Collections

Managing a collection of artwork is an asset management task with its own unique challenges, with no analogous circumstances. First, it is important in museums that the items in their collection are secured unobtrusively (let’s face it, a barcode on the frame of a painting or on the foot of a sculpture can take away from the aesthetic value and integrity of the piece). Also, it can be damaging to artwork to repeatedly have to handle it for inventory-taking purposes. Thus, the contactless scanning of RFID can prevent both the wear and tear and breakage of delicate and aged works of art, many of which are irreplaceable and invaluable. Further, unlike the retail environment, where the backroom is increasingly shrinking or disappearing, a museum’s actual art collection may dwarf – by a factor of 10-1 to a 100-1 – that which is actually on display for public viewing at any one time. Much of a museum’s collection of prints and small artifacts may be stored in drawers and files, while paintings and larger objects may be housed in on- and/or off-site warehouses.

For instance, The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam has implemented an RFID-based tagging system of its collection of over 15,000 paintings prints, some of which date back as far as 1400 A.D. The system replaces the former visual labeling system, and allows for contactless, continuous tracking of these irreplaceable works of art. The system allows for the tagged pieces to be identified without any handling, which can be highly detrimental to these artworks.

The task of museum management is magnified by the size and scope of the collection being housed. For instance, the United Kingdom’s National Science Museum has so many objects in its collection that much of its holdings are actually housed at a former air base outside London. In fact, the head of development for the museum’s Wroughton site, Sally Pettipher, likened the huge hangars to the famous warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pettipher recently stated that the museum is investigating RFID technology to help better manage its vast holdings. Finally, in a situation much like what has been experienced by libraries that have fully implemented RFID-based inventory systems, with less personnel and staff time needing to be devoted to inventory and security efforts, more effort can be directed to “value-added” functions, such as education and outreach efforts. Thus, the ability of RFID to provide continual security and contactless tracking of items in a museum’s inventory is a proposition that is uniquely valuable to the world of

Pages: 1 2