3 ms·

What do museums get out of using these instead of, say, QR codes for visitors to get informations on exhibits? Do these require users to install a custom applic

by jfim 11y ago

What do museums get out of using these instead of, say, QR codes for visitors to get informations on exhibits? Do these require users to install a custom application?

manyxcxi 11y ago
Having used them for a number of different applications, I can tell you that they are way better than QR codes from a 'just works' perspective to the user. Now, the dev/site team knows darn well that the hardest part of using beacons is getting the distances/interference measured and dealt with, but at the end of the day the user shouldn't have to do anything other than walk around and have your app installed on their phone. That is key, they have to have your app installed (and allow the correct OS permissions). After that you can (on iOS at least) pop up alerts, passively track how people are moving through your space, see what the most popular spaces are, change your app context to show them details about where they're standing, give them directions, etc.
- greggman 11y ago
  I don't know how accurate beacons are but I recently visited the Greenwich museum in Greenwich, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels, In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, and Casa Mila in Barcelona. All of which had audio tours using numbers (punch the number on some device they hand you) and all of them were fairly crowded and dense. If they were using beacons and the beacons had a range or more than about 1 to 1.5 meters I'd imagine a lot of conflicting inputs. I suppose good UX design could mitigate that showing all the options from all nearby beacons. I guess it just has me wondering is this a solution in search of a problem. Reading the article it also sounds like lots of poorly designed software. The author complained about pairing being a chore but it seems like with some good software you'd just put up any beacon, scan it, then pick what it corresponds to. If that beacon disappears or breaks just pick any beacon out of sack of beacons, place, scan, pick what it corresponds to. That seems like it should be a trivial 5 second operation. Am I missing something? I shouldn't care what the id is. I only care that it's unique to every other beacon (which the software can tell me the moment I scan it). I don't care about major or minor numbers. Just put any beacon anywhere, scan, pick what it corresponds to. Done.
- VLM 11y ago
  > they have to have your app installed Note that for school kids, a significant user of museum services, my kid's school issued ipads can scan any QR code and they use that in class, in fact its the only time I've seen someone "in the wild" actually using QR codes, but getting an app installed requires an impressive level of government bureaucracy and leadtime (basically once a year at curriculum review time you could get a new app added to next year's standard system if there's storage space and the review board approves, etc). They rolled out unlocked, which led to nothing but playing games, then went thru a phase of blacklisting but there's too much whack a mole to list everything to block, now they're pretty well locked down.
Tharkun 11y ago
Museum software dev here. Museum folks are pretty primitive in a way. Unlike websites, in a museum it's really hard to know which exhibits or parts of exhibits are popular, and which are not. Maybe you have 100 paintings, but people ignore 90 of them? Or maybe you'd like to automatically play some audio commentary as a visitor approaches a display? Or something a little fancier? Or maybe you've got a REALLY BUSY museum (think Louvre). It would be really nice to have a heat map of where everyone is. Too many people in that area? Let's direct new visitors elsewhere. There's a lot of demand for things like this. iBeacons are reasonably horrible, but they're less horrible than trying to use GPS indoors or relying on wifi for location detection.
- stanmancan 11y ago
  Why not computer vision? That way you don't rely on anyone having a phone at all
  - Tharkun 11y ago
    Yeah. Why not fully sentient androids while we're at it! Do you know how much money museums have? Let me quote you a nice, round number: 0.
    - mcphage 11y ago
      While I believe you, it seems weird, since they're in the business of purchasing multi-million dollar objects. So there's money coming through, although maybe they can't use it for that? It's too bad, though... Selling off one or two pieces, in order to make the user experience a whole lot better for all of the visitors, would probably be a net gain for the museum's goals.
    - stanmancan 11y ago
      People Counting[1] is a pretty big market and has plenty of solutions already. If small retail stores can afford it, I don't see why it would blow the budget for a museum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter
edent 11y ago
This is what we attempted to do with Qrpedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpedia - a project to link QR codes to (multi lingual) Wikipedia pages. The major sticking points were around museums wanting to control the content themselves - even if their websites weren't mobile friendly or translated - and educating people into installing a QR reader (admittedly, no more difficult than getting them to install your museum's app). The project is still in use with a number of zoos, galleries, and museums - but the QR stickers do occasionally fall off the exhibits
- IshKebab 11y ago
  Also the fact that "Ok google, wikipedia foo" is far far easier than using (and possibly installing) a QR reader app. Maybe if camera apps also functioned as QR readers automatically they might have gained some traction. But Google never enabled that functionality for some reason.
  - edent 11y ago
    True - up to a point. Most popular museums are too noisy for effective voice recognition.

by jfim 11y ago

What do museums get out of using these instead of, say, QR codes for visitors to get informations on exhibits? Do these require users to install a custom application?

manyxcxi 11y ago

Having used them for a number of different applications, I can tell you that they are way better than QR codes from a 'just works' perspective to the user. Now, the dev/site team knows darn well that the hardest part of using beacons is getting the distances/interference measured and dealt with, but at the end of the day the user shouldn't have to do anything other than walk around and have your app installed on their phone. That is key, they have to have your app installed (and allow the correct OS permissions). After that you can (on iOS at least) pop up alerts, passively track how people are moving through your space, see what the most popular spaces are, change your app context to show them details about where they're standing, give them directions, etc.

greggman 11y ago
I don't know how accurate beacons are but I recently visited the Greenwich museum in Greenwich, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels, In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, and Casa Mila in Barcelona. All of which had audio tours using numbers (punch the number on some device they hand you) and all of them were fairly crowded and dense. If they were using beacons and the beacons had a range or more than about 1 to 1.5 meters I'd imagine a lot of conflicting inputs. I suppose good UX design could mitigate that showing all the options from all nearby beacons. I guess it just has me wondering is this a solution in search of a problem. Reading the article it also sounds like lots of poorly designed software. The author complained about pairing being a chore but it seems like with some good software you'd just put up any beacon, scan it, then pick what it corresponds to. If that beacon disappears or breaks just pick any beacon out of sack of beacons, place, scan, pick what it corresponds to. That seems like it should be a trivial 5 second operation. Am I missing something? I shouldn't care what the id is. I only care that it's unique to every other beacon (which the software can tell me the moment I scan it). I don't care about major or minor numbers. Just put any beacon anywhere, scan, pick what it corresponds to. Done.
VLM 11y ago
> they have to have your app installed Note that for school kids, a significant user of museum services, my kid's school issued ipads can scan any QR code and they use that in class, in fact its the only time I've seen someone "in the wild" actually using QR codes, but getting an app installed requires an impressive level of government bureaucracy and leadtime (basically once a year at curriculum review time you could get a new app added to next year's standard system if there's storage space and the review board approves, etc). They rolled out unlocked, which led to nothing but playing games, then went thru a phase of blacklisting but there's too much whack a mole to list everything to block, now they're pretty well locked down.

Tharkun 11y ago

Museum software dev here. Museum folks are pretty primitive in a way. Unlike websites, in a museum it's really hard to know which exhibits or parts of exhibits are popular, and which are not. Maybe you have 100 paintings, but people ignore 90 of them? Or maybe you'd like to automatically play some audio commentary as a visitor approaches a display? Or something a little fancier? Or maybe you've got a REALLY BUSY museum (think Louvre). It would be really nice to have a heat map of where everyone is. Too many people in that area? Let's direct new visitors elsewhere. There's a lot of demand for things like this. iBeacons are reasonably horrible, but they're less horrible than trying to use GPS indoors or relying on wifi for location detection.

stanmancan 11y ago
Why not computer vision? That way you don't rely on anyone having a phone at all
- Tharkun 11y ago
  Yeah. Why not fully sentient androids while we're at it! Do you know how much money museums have? Let me quote you a nice, round number: 0.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    While I believe you, it seems weird, since they're in the business of purchasing multi-million dollar objects. So there's money coming through, although maybe they can't use it for that? It's too bad, though... Selling off one or two pieces, in order to make the user experience a whole lot better for all of the visitors, would probably be a net gain for the museum's goals.
  - stanmancan 11y ago
    People Counting[1] is a pretty big market and has plenty of solutions already. If small retail stores can afford it, I don't see why it would blow the budget for a museum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter

edent 11y ago

This is what we attempted to do with Qrpedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpedia - a project to link QR codes to (multi lingual) Wikipedia pages. The major sticking points were around museums wanting to control the content themselves - even if their websites weren't mobile friendly or translated - and educating people into installing a QR reader (admittedly, no more difficult than getting them to install your museum's app). The project is still in use with a number of zoos, galleries, and museums - but the QR stickers do occasionally fall off the exhibits

IshKebab 11y ago
Also the fact that "Ok google, wikipedia foo" is far far easier than using (and possibly installing) a QR reader app. Maybe if camera apps also functioned as QR readers automatically they might have gained some traction. But Google never enabled that functionality for some reason.
- edent 11y ago
  True - up to a point. Most popular museums are too noisy for effective voice recognition.