The Long Island Museum Information and Wayfinding App

Since the massive closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many museums have been trying to find ways to encourage visitor engagement while they slowly reopen. New technologies, such as interactive kiosks, are becoming common in museums all around the world to attract visitors in a modern way. For this project, we developed an interactive display with a database backend for The Long Island Museum in Stony Brook, New York. The LIM has an extensive collection of art, historical pieces, structures, and exhibits spread across their large campus. They also host many events and visitors, such as tours and school field trips. This app would be a way for the museum staff to actively update their collection along with other pertinent information such as staff members and messages. Using iPads as kiosks, visitors can then query this database to see featured exhibits, upcoming events, as well as a map of the museum campus. Therefore, the museum staff would work with the administrative backend of this application, while visitors are interacting with the mobile and web frontend. As the user is interacting with the kiosk, the information will be projected on a large screen that would be set up in the main lobby of The Carriage Museum. In addition, when the kiosks aren’t being used, they will enter an attract loop. In this state, the app would display a cycle of videos, animations, and general messages to greet visitors as they enter the museum. The main goal of this project is to use this interactive media display to create a more immersive and engaging atmosphere in the museum.