In this demo we present a system for immersive experiences in museums using Voice Commands (VCs) and Virtual Reality (VR). The system has been specifically designed for use by people with motor disabilities. Natural interaction is provided through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and allows to experience VR environments wearing an Head Mounted Display (HMD), i.e. the Oculus Rift. Insights gathered during the implementation and results from an initial usability evaluation are reported.

We present a work-in-progress interactive exhibit for the mu- seum of Onna (L'Aquila, Italy). The Onna Onlus and the citizens of Onna have the ambitious project to rebuild the town affected by the earthquake of April 2009 and to create a museum in memory of Onna. In addition to the tradi- tional fruition tools for museums, we have been asked for an interactive system capable to communicate the past events and the efforts invested. We are working on a multi-modal system composed of an indoor environment in which visitors can interact with a natural interface system and an outdoor module based on a cross-platform mobile application. A pro- filing method is also exploited in order to extract a profile of interest of each visitor and then use it to suggest in-depth personalized and geo-located information about the disaster and the local history via multimedia contents.

In this paper we present a work-in-progress interactive exhibit for the museum of Onna, a little town near to L'Aquila (Italy), almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of April 2009. The installation will be developed as an environment in which visitors of the museum can interact with a natural interaction system and then discover the history of the disaster via rich multimedia contents. Visitors are detected through the adoption of an RFID-based technology, which allows to store their interaction history and build an interest profile used to enrich the experience. Different scenarios have been implemented and tested in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

One of the most interesting issues in the field of cultural heritage is the adoption of multimedia systems for the visualization and organization of information. In this paper we present a natural interaction based system designed to represent multimedia contents related to the archaeological site of Shawbak, situated in the Petra region of Jordan. Contents are composed of texts, images and videos showing and explaining the archeological site areas and the history of the castle. This system was installed at the Limonaia di Palazzo Pitti (Italy) for the archeological exhibition called "From Petra to Shawbak".

This paper addresses the design and development of MediaPick [1], an interactive multi-touch system for semantic search of multimedia contents. Our solution provides an intuitive, easy-to-use way to select concepts organized according to an ontological structure and retrieve the related contents. Users are then able to examine and organize such results through semantic or subjective criteria. As use case we considered professionals who work with huge multimedia archives (journalists, archivists, editors etc.).

In this paper we describe TANGerINE, a tangible tabletop environment in which users can interact with digital contents manipulating tangible smart objects. Such objects provide continuous data about their status through the embedded wireless sensors, while an overhead computer vision module tracks their position and orientation. Merging sensing data, the system is able to detect a richer language of gestures and manipulations both on the tabletop and in its surroundings, enabling for a more expressive interaction language across different contexts.