How Germany’s leading art museum transformed visitor experience with AI-powered digital guides

Overview

The Hamburger Kunsthalle houses one of Germany’s most important art collections, featuring masterpieces from the Middle Ages through to contemporary art, including works by Caspar David Friedrich, Édouard Manet and Gerhard Richter.

As the country’s most-visited art museum, the Kunsthalle faced the challenge of providing meaningful, personalised experiences to diverse audiences with varying levels of art knowledge, time constraints and interests.

The museum turned to Smartify to provide a solution that would:

  1. Enhance visitor engagement without requiring additional hardware or complex setup
  2. Provide personalised content based on individual preferences and available time
  3. Offer seamless access to detailed information about their extensive collection
  4. Maintain the museum’s reputation for innovation without disrupting the overall gallery experience
     

Smartify allows us to individualise the visitor experience. People choose what they want to see, and this idea of making our guests more autonomous from any narratives that may be pre-existent is a great thing.

– Prof. Dr. Alexander Klar, Director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle

The solution

In working with Smartify, the Hamburger Kunsthalle achieved a national first, becoming the only museum in Germany to use AI-powered personalisation for audio guides.

Through this thoughtful and ethical use of artificial intelligence, every visitor is able to receive a bespoke audio guide tailored to their available time, individual interests and any specific artworks they want to see. As a result, guests can explore the collection on their own terms, without the museum prescribing a route.

In addition, Smartify provided the museum with:

  • A bring your own device (BYOD) model: Visitors simply scan a QR code when they arrive to access the guide through their phone’s web browser, with no app to download or special hardware required.
  • Advanced object recognition technology: Visitors can scan any artwork in the collection to instantly receive detailed information, insights and audio content from the museum’s expert curatorial team.
  • Seamless integration: The digital guide integrates smoothly with the museum’s existing infrastructure while providing multimedia content that enhances rather than distracts from the art viewing experience.

The results

The Hamburger Kunsthalle’s custom web-app provides a more dynamic alternative to traditional wall labels.

It enables strong engagement with the museum’s collection, with nearly three-quarters (72%) of users accessing object pages to learn more about the artworks on display.

What’s more, people who use our smart scanning feature to identify an object do so an average of five times during a visit. We find what they’re looking at quickly and reliably, with a platform-wide recognition success rate of 99.9%.

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