Title	THE RUBENS HOUSE APP
Brand	THE RUBENS HOUSE
Product/Service	ENHANCED MUSEUM EXPERIENCE USING IBEACONS
Category	A01. Innovation
Entrant Company	PROPHETS Antwerp, BELGIUM
Advertising Agency	PROPHETS Antwerp, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Lucas Caessens	Prophets	Concept
Micha Symoens	Prophets	Concept
Samuel Joos	Prophets	Concept
Micha Symoens	Prophets	Digital Artwork
Samuel Joos	Prophets	Programmer
Toon Severijns	Prophets	Programmer
Valentijn Steenhoudt	Prophets	Programmer

The Brief

Museums need to increase their “experience” to please visitors whose expectations are higher and higher. At the same time, government subsidies are decreasing. With the rumoured approaching launch of i-beacontechnology, we saw an opportunity to really use innovation, not only for improving visitors experience in the museum, but also to dust off the image of the Rubens House and make it the talk of the town throughout the entire world. We agreed on a budget of 20K to cover basic costs and we dedicated a team of passionate creative technologists, designers, content strategists and programmers to make it happen. Apart from time (we absolutely wanted to be the first museum deploying ibeacon technology), there were no restrictions but ‘relevance’. The museum gave access to all its experts and archives, in order to get the best and most complementary Rubens content on display. Apart from standard development tools such as augmented reality for the app, we needed a lot of empirical “playing around” with several types of beacons to determine which type worked best in the museum. We managed to get the prototype of the app up and running at the beginning of 2014, hardly a month after iBeacon technology introduction in Apple’s own US stores.

We wanted to show the full scope of the Rubens House, being much more than just the collection currently on display. We used augmentedreality to show what the museum looked like in the past. Using x-rays, the app shows how painting are made. High-res images provide visitors with superman-like view of details within the paintings. We used gamification techniques to educate, by inciting visitors to look for paintings in a room and to quiz along about the painter's family tree. We needed the iBeacon-technology to communicate in a natural, non-intrusive and dummy-proof way with the device. After multiple tests to finetune the app-iBeacon interaction, we managed to have the iPad application show content only at the exact places where one would expect it to. Because Apple just launched the integration of BLE support, Prophets needed to invest in a lot of research & development. The result was a working prototype which excels not only in the technological backend but also in the really friendly to use interface. Because BLE can trigger actions in the interface, users didn’t need to touch the screen to get a contextual interaction to their location. We wanted to challenge the traditional way of showing extra content in the museum. We used material from the Rubens House archive to create a gamification layer on top of all those extra knowledge. This made the app educational & challenging. Users of the app had a much better comprehension of the work they saw & stayed longer. Our biggest innovation within the app was the integration of augmented reality without the use of a single marker detector. We used the compass, gyroscope and the location data to generate a fully functional digital layer on top of the entrance portal. It was the first time in the world that somebody managed to use augmented reality with beacons.

Users were tracked and proved to spent more time in the museum (overall and in the rooms where actions were triggered) than the traditional museum visitors. 100% of the information was consulted and visitors interacted repeatedly with the interface. Visitors using the app were surveyed and stated they had far better comprehension of the artist and this works and agreed that they would use the app again when visiting the Rubenshuis or other musea using the technology. Overall customer satisfaction turned out to be very high. Based on this succes, the museum decided to install iBeacon technology permanently. Since it was the first iBeacon application ever to work in a museum, press around the world covered the story. Using Vimeo, the number of embeds started rising to 250+ reaching at least 387K video loads. This caused a vivid stream of visits by leading institutions, journalists and thought leaders, who kept on fuelling press coverage, online and print. The Rubens house iBeacon app was the first app in Belgium that made use of iBeacon-technology. For months, the Rubens House could hardly manage the number of guided tours to technology and cultural professionals from Belgium and abroad.