Indoor Content Delivery Solution for a Museum Based on BLE Beacons

Area of Science:

• Digital Transformation
• Cultural Heritage Technology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Digital transformation offers opportunities to enhance user experiences in various sectors, including cultural institutions.
• Museums can leverage emergent technologies to provide innovative services and engage visitors more effectively.
• Integrating advanced technologies like augmented reality (AR) can enrich the museum experience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present an indoor location system and content delivery solution for museums using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons.
• To enable visitors to navigate freely within a museum and receive location-specific augmented reality (AR) content.
• To evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the proposed system in a real-world museum environment.

Main Methods:

• Development of an indoor location system utilizing BLE Beacons and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) for position acquisition.
• Implementation of a content delivery solution to provide AR content based on the visitor's identified location.
• Conducting detailed studies and detection tests in four different scenarios within the Foz Côa Museum, Portugal.

Main Results:

• Analysis of RSSI under various conditions to understand signal behavior.
• Detection tests measured room identification accuracy, achieving 96% precision.
• Signal reception analysis showed 70% consistent detection, 20% intermittent, 4% undetected, and 6% unwanted beacon detection.

Conclusions:

• The developed indoor location and content delivery system, based on BLE Beacons and RSSI, is suitable for museum applications.
• The system's high accuracy in room identification supports effective location-aware content delivery.
• This technology enhances the visitor experience by providing personalized AR content within the museum space.