Many museums offer their visitors the use of a mobile guide to enhance their visit experience. Novel mobile guides have the potential to provide personalized, context-aware, rich content to museum visitors. However, they might also affect the way visitors behave and interact. While many studies have examined novel features that these guides can provide to enhance the visit experience, few have looked into the impact that a mobile guide might have on the actual behavior of the visitors.

In this work, we analyze how museum visitors behave, with and without a mobile museum guide. The analysis is both statistical and visual. In statistical analysis, we looked at 400 museum visitors, and compared how visitors behavior changed with and without a multimedia guide. For the visual analysis, we used the logs of these visitors to visualize the visitor behavior patterns for the benefit of the museum curators. The visualizations can be seen in our CGF paper, as well as in the Museum visitor behavior system analysis  system we implemented.

Here, you can see a talk given on this topic at the ISVIS 2015 conference: