Brief

Glean is my Bachelor’s degree projet about Museums in France. I decided to work on this subject since I heard a lot of people around me saying that they do not go to the museum or that it is not made for them. I was really curious to understand why.

How to arouse the interest of people who desert museums?

1Understand people

Museums can be sometimes seen like places where you need to know a lot about what is exhibited but as Pierre Auguste Renoir used to say “Painting is learned in museums”.

I had to look the the kind of person who never goes in museums in order to have my target user. This person is between 25 and 39 (66% of them do not go to the museum) with low salary (77% of them do not go to the museum) and because the family is growing at this age, they do not have money or time to spend in museums.

User path through gamification.

My idea was to make this kind of people go to the museum using gamification and immersion. I contacted the Dobrée Museum in Nantes, France to think about my subject with them and to have proper feedback. We decided to use AR instead of VR because the purpose was to offer a complementary experience to users instead of replacing museums.

The Dobrée Museum.

2An experience for people

There is a little story for each museum in which you will have to resolve puzzles in AR to have each museum item in your collection.

When you think about the whole user experience, it is not just during the use of a service its also before and after. This is why I imagined an experience starting at home (for the first items) and then slowly making people go to the museum (to complete their collections) and sharing it around them.

The whole user experience.

Glean means obtaining information from various sources, often with difficulty.

The idea behind Glean is to collect whole world museums. Children usually like to play and collect toys. Since Glean is a pocket museum, they will have this possibility and make their parents (my target user) go with them to the museum to achieve their collection.

Map and list view.

Each museum can have a page in Glean with information about it, its location (linked to the GPS app) and the overview of the collection that you can collect. Your items are also organized by epoch.

Museum page and collection.

You can see your collection, click on an object to have more details or see what steps are missing to unlock a puzzle to have new museum items. You can also unlock achievements (titles for instance) and share it around you.

Progress and achievements.

Glean uses Augmented Reality to display 3D puzzles so that means having an image target. I used Vuforia and Unity to build the AR experience and embedded it into a webapp.

The Glean flyer.

It can be painful for users to have to download and print it but if you give them this target on the back of a museum flyer they can easily try Glean. People are really curious about new technologies like AR.

Glean is use.

3Glean in a few words

Glean uses discovery, gamification and curiosity of new technologies (AR) to arouse the interest of most people who deserts museums. The app is effortless and starts easily at home. The willing of completing the collection will lead those people to the museum.

Working alongside the Dobrée Museum’s team helped me to build a service with a concrete goal to solve a concrete problem.