Exploring the museum with a handheld projector in your own room

With the development of information technology, digital museum has already been a quite beneficial method for the protection and communication of cultural heritage. For digital museums, interactive and multimedia technologies of exhibition greatly enrich visitor’s experience, and make it easier to gain insight into the connotation of different cultural exhibits vividly. With the consideration of balancing the tradeoff between the device cost and display effect, in this paper, we propose a digital museum exhibition system based on the combination of handheld projector and depth sensor. We treat the walls of common rooms as the projection screen, and then mapping virtual images, which reflect the real museum exhibitions, on these “walls”. Users can walk in the room freely, and browse images by changing the irradiation area of projector; furthermore, they can explore different virtual exhibition rooms by interacting with the projected virtual interface. Key procedures to realize the proposed virtual exploring system are described, and several experiments have been taken to test the usability and user experience of the proposed system, which is of low cost and easy to use, especially suitable for individual users and small organizations.