A Portable Device for Five Sense Augmented Reality Experiences in Museums

Augmented reality (AR) nowadays is focused in two senses, sight and hearing. The work presented here is part of the Mobile Five Senses Augmented Reality system for Museums (M5SAR) project, which has the goal of developing an AR system to be a guide in cultural and historical events and museums, complementing or replacing traditional guides, directional signs or maps, while enhancing the user’s experience by adding multisensorial information to multiple museum objects. The existing solutions for this type of devices either lack portability or fail to implement all the human senses at the same time. This paper presents a new device capable of extending augmented reality experiences to all five human senses, through the use of a portable device that can reproduce stimulus of touch, taste and smell. The proposed apparatus is meant to be paired with a mobile application that controls which sensorial interface is activated and when, relaying that information to the portable device. The application, running on the user’s smartphone or tablet, sends the activation instructions via Bluetooth, using a communication protocol, which is then received by the device’s core microcontroller. Then, the microcontroller acts accordingly, activating the requested physical interfaces to deliver the multisensorial media to the user