Abstract:
Museums have become through time the cultural conscience of nations by preserving cultural heritage. Although cultural heritage provides a valuable form of learning about mankind, the display of exhibits might not pique visitors’ interest. In order to provide engaging and appealing experiences, museums have integrated a number of technologies in their environments. Particularly, there are promising results with the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technology, enabling the implementation of smart objects to grant exhibits advanced capabilities. Gamification techniques are also commonly used in cultural heritage scenarios to further draw visitors’ attention. On this sense, several museums offer for example interactive question-based games. However, these questions must be periodically renewed and such task is time-consuming given the lack of automation of this procedure. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a low-maintenance gamified smart object platform to automate the creation of questions about exhibits by exploiting semantic web technologies. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) the design of a gamified smart object platform for museums based on a trivia quiz app; (ii) the automation of question generation schemes for the proposed game; and (iii) the development of a prototype of the proposed platform in a real-life scenario.