Enhancing user experience at museums using smart phones with RFID

With the advancement in cell phone technologies and its increased use as a multimedia platform, we can extend its application to enhance the experience of museum visitors. Smart phones can be used to provide full personalized multimedia presentations in a museum environment. This design proposal is aimed at increasing museum visitors and, boosting profits, and greatly reducing maintenance costs for museum operators. We propose a new technique to interface a museum´s artifact specific multimedia files on the network to smart phones. Our design offers an RFID based interface that can be used for educational purposes in museums or conference settings. The design aims at the interaction between the user and specific artifacts by providing additional data sent wirelessly through the museum or conference database to a portable device such as the Motorola Q smart phone. The smart phone will contain the RFID reader and a tag that will store its MAC address. A central RFID reader will be used to provide Internet access to each user by scanning the MAC address on the smart phone tag and allowing wireless access for it. The RFID reader on the smart phone will read the tags embedded in the artifacts and corresponding data will be fetched from the network and transmitted to the device via WiFi or other wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth. We will first demonstrate the functionality of our design using an RFID reader interfaced with a laptop, which has wireless Internet connectivity. Different tags will be used as artifact identifiers and appropriate information from the Internet will be obtained and displayed on the laptop. This will include programming the reader to retrieve data matched to the artifact. The next step in the design would be to implement it using the MC9090, which is a handheld mobile device with an integrated RFID reader and WiFi. The program for the design implementation will be loaded on this device and the system functionality will be verified.