Marcello Sarini and Carlo Strapparava

Hyperaudio is a research project for developing a museum exploration and information providing system able to organize the presentation of a museum content taking into account the visitor's needs and the layout of the physical space. Equipped with a location-aware Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and wearing headphones, visitors freely move in a museum. The system is able to integrate a physical space with a virtual space in order to build a more general notion of augmented space: not only can the system provide the visitor with information tailored on his own interests and interaction history, but it can also support the visitor in his own exploration of the physical space. We found helpful to separate distinct functionalities about user modelling. These components are useful in planning the content presentations to the visitors and the suggestions for the visit. A presentation could take into account what the user already knows (to avoid boring repetitions, to make new things easier to understand by making comparisons, etc...), what the user is interested to (to propose new concepts and/or location to go etc...) and the interaction way the user seems to prefer.