TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED VISIT TO MUSEUMS. A CASE STUDY: "KEYS TO ROME"

What a boring experience!" This could be a teenager comment after a school trip to a museum. In fact, the general idea about museums is that they are locations merely devoted to the exposition of artifacts and showcases, places considered as boring and uncommunicative, far away from our everyday life. In this paper we are going to present a case study based on our experience related to the "Keys to Rome" exhibition, the final event of V-Must.net project (Virtual Museums Transnational Network), where we focused our attention on two main aspects with the purpose of demonstrating that technology can help in changing the common idea about museums. First, we analyzed the users' ability in interacting with the technology available in the exhibit to measure the real level of user usability. Second, we evaluated the pedagogical potentiality of these technological applications for further researches with schools. "Keys to Rome" is an exhibition, unique in its genre, that runs in parallel in four different connected locations: Alexandria of Egypt, at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Amsterdam, at the Allard Pierson Museum; Sarajevo, at the Archaeological Museum, and Rome, at the Imperial Fora Museum. In this context technology plays a very important role: with augmented reality applications, natural interactions, serious games, virtual reconstructions, holographic displays, it contributes to create an innovative environment that helps the users in understanding, enhancing and developing their level of immersion and finally the experience as a whole. Therefore, thanks to technology visitors do not step into a regular museum but they can travel through time and space in a virtual - and virtuous - visit of the Past.