Acoustiguide Smartour
Reaching Out to New Audiences Beyond the Museum Walls
Smartour is Acoustiguide’s innovative and interactive application for smartphones, currently available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This platform enables museums and heritage sites to provide visitors easy and engaging access to their art and cultural treasures, and offers a rich, inspiring experience.
Smartour has been especially designed for a generation of visitors who embrace new mobile technologies and who appreciate the ability to explore content at their leisure. Smartour can be used before, during and after their visit, showcasing the site’s collection in an exciting new way. Utilizing the application’s unique community features, a museum can create a community of engaged followers.
Art Anytime, Anywhere
Smartour can be used from any corner on the globe, allowing users to take a virtual tour of the museum at any time and from anywhere; with Smartour, an ever growing number of smartphone users can have immediate access to art collections on their own device to keep, enjoy, reuse and share.
This new approach provides cultural institutions with the tools to instantly create an interactive relationship with their visitors that extends well beyond the museum walls and on-site visit.
Key Features
Multiple Ways to Access Content
Thanks to the multiple options available on Smartour, visitors can choose to explore tour content using their preferred mode of access:
• Traditional numeric keypad
• Interactive map – a combination of on-site orientation and wayfinding
• Numbered exhibit list with preview images and titles
• Cover flow – allows browsing tour stops by images
• Categorized list – enables grouping of exhibits by theme
• Search function – allows free text search (by artist, title, location or other metadata)
• Multiple language tour selection
As any Acoustiguide product, Smartour supports multiple tours and languages. Moreover, its user interface appears in the user’s selected audio language.
Multimedia
In an era when visitors tend to skim through text, audiovisual content is truly invaluable. Acoustiguide’s Smartour incorporates the latest advances in multimedia technology, incorporating audio, video, still images and slide shows in an intuitive touch-screen interface.
Additional features include:
• Zooming capabilities
• Additional information layers and descriptive text for visitors who want to learn more
• Bookmarking feature which allows the visitor to group their favorite exhibits and create their own tour or collection
Enhanced User Interaction
Registration System
Smartour’s advanced registration system enables a cultural institution to create or expand its existing mailing list and connect with visitors whether or not they visit the site.
The application collects and sends user registration information to a cloud-based system, which can be accessed by museum personnel through the internet. The expanding list of registered users can be exported into standard computer file formats.
Museum Information
The ‘More’ feature provides additional information about the site including hours and admission, directions, special exhibition details, and upcoming events.
Push Notifications
The cloud-based push notifications system was designed to help a site keep in touch with Smartour users before, during or after their visit. Using the notifications system, site personnel can inform application users about:
• Events and happenings
• News and items of interest
• Daily communication
Users will receive these notifications instantly and can react to them in real time. For example, while on a visit, a user receives a notification about a free curator-led tour of the exhibition and can decide to join the tour.
Social Media Integration
The fully integrated social media features allow Smartour users to share their experience with their friends on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Sites can initiate such conversations and invite others to join the discussion, or benefit from the discussions generated by users, expanding their fan and follower bases.
The didactic outlet that includes sharing and exchanging of visitors’ points of view that last well beyond the on-site experience, increases visitors’ level of interaction and engagement, giving them the notion they are part of a dialogue.
