Black Radley Uses Microsoft Tools to Create a Device for the Museum

Microsoft teamed up with Black Radley and the Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery to create a solution that would react to museum patrons.

Challenges

Black Radley is a consultancy organization that works with public services to inspire and invigorate systems and people. Black Radley works closely with museums within the United Kingdom on both technical and commercial projects. Provincial museums like SMAG are under increasing pressure to be more compelling and profitable and to ultimately drive higher attendance from the general public.

Black Radley has had a desire to make museum exhibits more intelligent for some time. Joe, CTO from Black Radley was inspired to explore Microsoft technology after attending the Hereford Smart Devs community meetup in February 2017 where Martin Kearn presented on Microsoft Cognitive Services. Black Radley attempted this project using Linux and several open-source tools and found that setting up a developed environment proved to be a challenge. 

Public funding for museums was likely to decline in the foreseeable future. To maintain their services, museums and galleries are trying to attract more visitors and understand the visitors' experience. The organization saw two primary ways to help museums achieve this goal, make exhibits more compelling, and better understand patrons.

Some exhibits may also have passive infrared (PIR) sensor-based, motion-triggered audio descriptions, videos, or other media that give some information about the exhibit as a patron approach. While these multi-media descriptions do grab attention and give information in a more compelling way than printed text, they still have to be created in a generic way that is suitable for all audiences. Additionally, the PIR sensor systems are relatively "dumb" in that they cannot detect when a person walks off. This causes the descriptions to continue playing until completed, regardless of whether anyone is listening.

The organization wanted to create a device that would enable a visitor to approach an exhibit in the museum and have audio that was tailored for their demographic played back to them. This was in the hope that this customization would provide a more enjoyable, entertaining, and informative experience.

Initiatives

Microsoft teamed up with Black Radley and the Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery to create a solution that would react to museum patrons as they interact with exhibits based upon their approximate age, gender, and emotional state. Additionally, the solution would provide detailed insight on how patrons traverse the museum, which exhibits they linger at, and for how long. The goal was to address problems that museums face around making exhibits more compelling for patrons and better understanding how patrons use the museums.

Results

Microsoft provided tools to help museums in improving exhibits by using cognitive intelligence to give a tailored experience based upon demographic information and tracking and reporting on how patrons interact with exhibits and the museum as a whole to allow the museum to report to funding bodies and better understand their customers. Prerequisite tools like Visual Studio Code, Cognitive Services Face API, Azure subscription to use Azure App Service and Azure Table storage, Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 3, and Power BI were issued by Microsoft. This solution helped museums enhance the visitor experience and to understand how visitors respond to exhibits. Working with Microsoft and using Visual Studio, Black Radley was able to accelerate through a working solution within a couple of days.