In accordance with their educational mission, art museums and art galleries generally display their artworks accompanied by explanatory signage. Such signage must necessarily be limited in size in order not to detract from the visual experience provided by the artwork itself. Unfortunately this correspondingly limits the amount of educational information the signage can convey. The problem is even more acute with respect to international visitors to galleries and museums, since space limitations typically preclude displaying multiple copies of even minimal signage in multiple natural languages. In this thesis project an application was developed to mitigate the above problem. The application enables a camera-equipped mobile device to act as a real-time multilingual guide for art museum and art gallery visitors. The mobile device's camera captures machine readable codes (QR codes) mounted unobtrusively on or near each artwork, that identify the artwork and provide an index into a device-hosted multilingual multimedia database containing supplementary textual, audio and video information in the visitor's language of choice. Since the application is hosted entirely upon the mobile device and requires no modification to the museum/gallery environment except the mounting of very small, passive, non-powered QR code tags on or near each artwork, the application provides the equivalent functionality of a complete location-based service while requiring no costly modification or enhancement of the museum's or gallery's existing infrastructure.
