How to Outreach the External World from a Museum: The Case of the Marsili's Spirit App

A well known critical success factor for any institution (including museums) is its outreach. Outreach, in fact, concerns how wholly unknown people can be connected and attracted by a given institution. Hence, every successful strategy includes outreach activities, which very often involve the use of digital technologies. In fact, digital literacy is progressively increasing and, hence, providing a universal language that can be utilized to decode any information that comes from very far. Virtual reality applications have flourished in museums, for example, showing in videos how past cultures lived and prospered. Augmented reality techniques are being utilized to help visitors imagine the appearance of ancient landscapes on site (e.g., the Colosseum at the Roman Empire time), mixing archaeological remains with superimposed graphical representations. Much more can be done, however, taking advantage of the multimodal interactions that can be realized with the use of modern technologies. Among the many possible choices, gamification techniques, for example, are emerging as a viable instrument to incentive people to accomplish given tasks. As such, we here describe how we exploited such paradigm to outreach the exterior of a museum. In particular, we here describe the design and implementation of a smartphone app, available on the iPhone App Store since July 2012, whose scope is that of ferrying visitors from the outside to the inside of five of the main cultural attractions of Bologna, Italy. All this has been achieved providing new and additional (also artistic) content, thus departing from any traditional museum guide paradigm.