Follow the Blue Butterfly – An Immersive Augmented Reality Museum Guide

Abstract

We present our concept and prototypical implementation of an avatar guide that helps museum visitors to navigate to chosen points of interest. The prototype shows an animated butterfly with interactive behavior that is controlled by a state machine. The avatar’s path can be pre-defined at an authoring stage, by walking the space with the head-mounted display and by placing path nodes interactively, or it can be generated at runtime, in which case the whole area needs to be scanned and processed beforehand. As the app is iteratively redesigned and tested with first-time users for accessibility, we report on first lessons learnt.