exhiSTORY: Smart Self-organizing Exhibits

Creating stories for exhibitions is a fascinating and in parallel laborious task. As every exhibition is designed to tell a story, museum curators are responsible for identifying, for each exhibit, its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. In this context, we analyze how the technological advances in the fields of sensors and Internet of Things can be utilized in order to construct a “smart space,” which consists of self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized, and highly stimulating experiences. We present the system named “exhiSTORY” that intends to provide the appropriate infrastructure to be used in museums and places where exhibitions are held in order to support smart exhibits. The architecture of the system and its application potential is presented and discussed.