The VR / internal 3D view of buildings seems to be one thing, a location based tour / etc of the interior of a building something entirely different…?

The second thing - well, yeh, for sure you’d if you wanted to proactively nudge the user via a notification on their phone (“hey, you’re standing next to X”) then that would very much mean beacons ...which would then mean an app… and then we’re into the whole “how hard is this to get users to use” question, ..the minimal phones / apps / motivations which support this…and before we know it it’s an “app vs mobile web” conversation ...AGAIN… :-/

But.. I’m not 100% convinced that you couldn’t do much of this in an intelligent and user friendly way using a mobile web approach and just thinking harder about the actual user experience. For instance, all of these are doable / easy:

- “Send a free text to ***** to get more information about this artefact” -> system then sends a text message with a link

- “Go to *** on your phone and key in 1234 to find out more about this artefact” -> user ends up at specific page for object

- “Freephone *** to hear more about this artefact” -> user hears audio file about artefact

… or the more obvious ones:

- “Scan this…” (oh god) “ ..qr code..” … 

- “Go to this web address..” 

The locative RPi work that Nick mentions is still A Thing - we’re looking for projects to make it happen with - please ping me off-list if you want to play. We’ve just launched some digital signage at The American Museum which uses a RPi and is edited via their website - which I will be writing about some more shortly - so this is an area we’re poking / growing in confidence with.

As Phil knows, we also have a mobile tour app - http://wptour.org/ - which (again, as Phil knows, he’s been very patient..) is waiting for us to do some work on. Again though, we are limited by the capability that is offered by the mobile web - it just isn’t possible to notify based on location unless the user has the browser on their phone open all the time.

cheers

Mike