Development of service oriented mobile AR applications for museum learning activities

This paper presents the implementation of a Service Oriented Mobile AR Architecture focused on museum learning activities. The service-orientated architecture presented is a collaboration between a mobile AR platform and a web service framework that consumes third party service APIs or linked open data from participating museum collections. The architecture and associated codebase is used to implement virtual museum exhibitions based around mobile AR applications. It is also based on an open platform where the web service serves to move business logic that performs interoperability tasks including metadata, multimedia and 3D content acquisition and utilization to the front end. As such, museum content requests are implemented through APIs calls such as those provided by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Europeana, SierraLeoneHeritage, and other participating museum APIs. Further, the architecture can consume other third party APIs such as Google Maps. This paper describes the architecture and codebase that is now open source and can be used for developing a virtual museum exhibition based on the service-orientation — the codebase can be accessed on GitHub.