The Louvre museum is one of the most well known museums in the world. It is one of Paris's many tourist attractions and contains about 300,000 works of art divided into seven sections.

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Introduction

The Louvre museum is one of the most well known museums in the world. It is one of Paris's many tourist attractions and contains about 300,000 works of art divided into seven sections. Founded in 1793, the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world with nearly 6 million visitors each year.

         Recently I have given the task for creating a computerized information center for the visitors of the museum to display information of the most popular works of art and their location.

Manual Navigation

The visitor of the museum needs to first get a map to the museum. On the map the different sections of the museum are marked according to what part of history they represent.  Not all visitors to the museum know about the different works of arts in the museum. Most will go through each section of the museum, regardless to whether it appeals to their interest or not. This may be fine for many, especially the tourists; however many will want to only want to see most famous objects in the museum due to the lack of time to go through the whole of this massive museum. So the visitor will have to look at the map, check the location of a particular object and go to it to see it. The map only shows the picture of one important object per section without any description, so it assumes that the visitor knows about it. The visitor will then go to the object to only find out that the description is written in French. This is not very convenient to the foreign visitor. There is a service in the museum to solve this. This is in form of audio books. A visitor is expected to deposit 100 Euros or leave an ID on the counter when taking the audio book. The audio book itself has a cost to it. However if a visitor arrives in the afternoon to the museum he will find that all audio books have been already taken due to their high demand. However even the audio books may not appeal to all the visitors, since they have a lot of material recorded on them which many won't even hear unless having a full day visit to the museum. The non-French speaking visitor will then either have to waste his money on an audio book or go through the museum in circles searching for "interesting" objects. This could have been solved only if the visitor had a convenient way to find exactly what he wants with detailed information about it. Maps are not enough for that and audio books may be inconvenient to some people or even unavailable

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Problems for the current system

  1. Audio books require a large deposit which most people wont be ready to pay
  2. Foreign visitors cannot read the French description of the object and therefore will not satisfy their curiosity
  3. Not all visitors are interested in the same things and so the map, which shows only 1 or 2 pictures per section, will not necessary make the visitor want to visit that section if he doesn’t know what it is about.
  4. It takes a lot of time for a visitor to go around the whole museum if he doesn’t know ...

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