Who, visiting an exhibition, has not felt the need to follow up their experience with the support of an audio guide? An instrument that everyone knows but which is now evolving in order to become increasingly user-friendly and truly useful for visitors.
One of the new frontiers of this evolution is the mobile phone audio guide. The idea generates from a simple observation: nowadays mobile phones are the most common means of communication and they are the most used instrument by categories of heterogeneous users. Why not exploit the familiarity of this object to make visits to excavations and museums more enthralling? Visitors can access news and discussions by simply using their mobile. There are various solutions in this sense and the first trials of this service seem to have produced satisfying results.
One of the most successful experiences was the exhibition realized at Palazzo Strozzi, “Cina: alla corte degli imperatori” where Vodafone presented for the first time in Italy a new service, able to exploit Bluetooth connection, used by a wide range of mobile phones. Practically, thanks to this connection, visitors can download on their own mobile the software containing the audio guide. This was not the first experience in this sector for the telephone company, which last year had already participated in the exhibition dedicated to Kandinsky at the Mazzotta Foundation in Milan. In this case, visitors were offered an audio guide via MMS of the work “Composizione VII”, with comments by Vittorio Sgarbi.
During the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, visitors were provided with three routes: a first route where the curator, Romeo Gigli, explained the production, a second one studied for children, and a third one in English with comments by the Director of Palazzo Strozzi, James Bradburne.
But the use of mobile phones as audio guides has been talked about for years now in Italy. For instance, the company from Florence Audioguide proposes HandyGuide, which uses mobiles as audio guides with traditional functions: play-pause-rewind. The software recognizes the chosen language and remembers if and where the listening has been interrupted and it sends informative SMSs. Connection occurs through a phone call: the system calls the visitor’s mobile.
Roman Media Mobile proposes something similar with the Easy-Guide service. This is a sort of virtual “cicerone” that guides visitors through various types of routes, both indoors (museums, exhibitions, churches, monuments, …) and outdoors (city routes, itineraries, fairs).
This instrument had already been used by the Venice Biennale in 2005, for the visit route “Le Madonne del Chianti” in Florence and Tuscany, for the exhibition “La città che sale” in Bergamo, the exhibition “Mario Schifano - Televisione cattiva maestra” at Palazzo Ruspoli, the exhibition “L’uomo del Rinascimento. Leon Battista Alberti e le arti a Firenze fra ragione e bellezza” at Palazzo Strozzi.
The guide accompanies visitors through different itineraries according to their profile and their requirements. As far as traditional cultural tourism is concerned, during an exhibition users can choose which route to follow and in which room to stop, requesting, if they wish, further information, personalizing to the most their visit. Even for visits to cities and archaeological sites it is possible to follow traditional or “alternative” routes. For instance a cultural visit can be combined, for young people, with stops at entertainment places, or it is possible to choose an eno-gastronomic itinerary. The same guide has also been conceived for the support of sport or religious tourism.
A service conceived specifically for open air itineraries or in the case of dispersed museums or museum networks is represented by Agata (Audioguide gsm for art, tourism and environment). Besides the audio guide service, this instrument allows the use of a number of additional services: news, polls, blogs, personal diaries with visit routes, electronic payments and reservations.
The project has been tested by five municipalities in Abruzzo, which decided to use this technology to facilitate the understanding of information on tourism, culture and events of handmade and typical products.

(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)