Recording and superimposing visitors in a museum for sharing exhibition experiences

Experience-based exhibitions are effective in helping people understand the mechanism, functions, and background information on the exhibits. Visitors, however, do not necessarily experience the exhibits in the expected way. A museum cannot prepare explainers for all the exhibits, and the information on description panels is sometimes not enough. In this paper, we propose a system that records and superimposes past visitors around an exhibit three-dimensionally. Visitors see the behaviors of past visitors, and obtain a better understanding of the exhibit. The proposed system, named the “Time-leaping Seat,” consists of the train seat of an exhibit, two depth cameras, two client PCs, a server PC, a touch panel interface, and cables. The system offers visitors two experiences: 1. Visitors can see a scene in which the exhibit, they themselves, and past visitors are together. 2. Visitors can see a scene where they are sitting on other seats of exhibits (on which they cannot sit in practice). The Time-leaping Seat was installed and exhibited in the Digital Railway Museum for about two weeks. A total of 1691 visitors experienced our exhibit, and 46 visitors and a curator answered our questionnaire for our evaluation. The responses showed that we achieved our objectives: visitors understood the exhibit´s functions intuitively, the proposed system enhanced their interest in the exhibit, and visitors´ experiences could be shared with subsequent visitors.