Indoor Positioning System EAGER Project Public Outcomes Report

This EAGER project sought to generate early knowledge for the museum field about the capabilities and limitations of an Indoor Positioning System to: 1) automate the collection of visitor movement data for museum research, and 2) enable location-aware applications designed to support museum visitor learning. Working with Qualcomm, Inc., the Exploratorium installed and experimented with an early prototype of a whole-museum, WiFi-based IPS that acquired and processed timestamped location data (latitude/longitude) from mobile test devices, similar to cell phones. The project 1) defined IPS ground-truth testing protocols for three levels of location resolution: gallery (dozen or more meters), cluster (several meters), and exhibit (one meter or less); 2) tested the reliability of the prototype IPS to collect visitor movement data at all three location resolutions; 3) prototyped and evaluated a location-aware mobile application that allowed visitors to listen to and record “crowd-sourced” comments within a gallery; and, 4) developed and made public tools to assist in the analysis of timestamped latitude/longitude data, which can be adapted to accommodate other types of positioning systems beyond this project’s prototype WiFi-based IPS.