The Future Of History Is Mobile: Experiencing Heritage On Personal Devices

The use of personal devices for mobile tours in museums and heritage sites, which began with audio tours decades ago, is experiencing a renaissance in the age of the smart phone. Visitors to museums and heritage buildings or ruins spend a large percentage of their time on site using their smart phones or tablets for finding information, texting or taking pictures to send to friends and families. For heritage professionals, the logical progression was to find ways to turn these personal devices into next-generation guides that tell stories and convey contextual information. With the onset of apps, there has been a surge of creative energy as organizations use advanced mobile technologies to transform the experience of visitors to museums and to historical and archaeological sites, with the potential not yet fully realized. Mobile technology can now bring inanimate artifacts to life, provide virtual windows to the past and add layers of knowledge and information to give users deeper insights. More and more heritage organizations are testing the waters by creating their own mobile media and native apps, and while the results have sometimes been ineffective or gimmicky, some early adopters have already gotten it right. The successes so far are driving a paradigm shift of how heritage organizations relate to their collections, to the public and even to the world at large.