Extending Visitor's Reality at Museums

The use of Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to design low-cost, innovative systems for displaying information for the exhibits at a museum, is explored in this work. The aim is to augment reality around an exhibit and allow the visitor to get information instantly without the need to use wearable smart devices or other electronic equipment, which is the common practice until today. This paper describes in depth both the system's topology and the embedded system installed at each exhibit. The main advantages to adopt the proposed solution are the low-cost, the system's extensibility (due to the software) and the disappearance of devices held or worn by the visitor.