In 1997, the very first tour guide robot RHINO was deployed in a museum in Germany. With the ability to navigate autonomously through the environment, the robot gave tours to over 2,000 visitors. Today, RHINO itself has become an exhibit and is no longer operational. In this paper, we present RHINO-VR, an interactive museum exhibit using virtual reality (VR) that allows museum visitors to experience the historical robot RHINO in operation in a virtual museum. RHINO-VR, unlike static exhibits, enables users to familiarize themselves with basic mobile robotics concepts without the fear of damaging the exhibit. In the virtual environment, the user is able to interact with RHINO in VR by pointing to a location to which the robot should navigate and observing the corresponding actions of the robot. To include other visitors who cannot use the VR, we provide an external observation view to make RHINO visible to them. We evaluated our system by measuring the frame rate of the VR simulation, comparing the generated virtual 3D models with the originals, and conducting a user study. The user-study showed that RHINO-VR improved the visitors' understanding of the robot's functionality and that they would recommend experiencing the VR exhibit to others.

In a proof-of-concept study, education and artificial intelligence researchers have demonstrated the use of a machine-learning model to predict how long individual museum visitors will engage with a given exhibit. The finding opens the door to a host of new work on improving user engagement with informal learning tools. "Education is an important part of the mission statement for most museums," says Jonathan Rowe, co-author of the study and a research scientist in North Carolina State University's Center for Educational Informatics (CEI). "The amount of time people spend engaging with an exhibit is used as a proxy for engagement and helps us assess the quality of learning experiences in a museum setting. It's not like school--you can't make visitors take a test."

Why bother with a human docent when a robot could give you a guided tour? Last week, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, revealed its new employee -- an interactive robot named Pepper. The 4-foot-tall humanoid robot was created by Softbank, which donated 30 robots to the museum last year. This friendly Pepper robot wants to show you around the Smithsonian museum. "By interacting with museum visitors and providing insight on different exhibits, Pepper will help guide their educational experience through the Smithsonian that they otherwise might have missed out on," Steve Carlin, chief strategy officer of Softbank Robotics, said in a statement.