Web AR Museum Guide with Image Tracking and a Curator CMS
A no-install web AR guide for small museums and heritage sites: visitors point their phone at an artefact or panel and see 3D reconstructions, audio and bilingual stories anchored to it, while curators add content through a simple CMS. A beginner-friendly AR final year project with a clear customer in underfunded museums.
Beginner
Achievable by one student in a semester with familiar tools.1 semester · 2 students
6 to ship
3 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- A web AR page that recognises at least 8 artefact images or display panels using image tracking and anchors content to them, with no app install.
- Three content types per exhibit: a 3D model or reconstruction, an audio narration and a short text story, each in English and Urdu (or another local language).
- A curator CMS where staff upload a target photo, attach content, preview and publish, without touching code.
- A QR code per exhibit that opens the right page, with a graceful fallback (audio and text) on phones that cannot run AR.
- Anonymous visit analytics: scans per exhibit, time spent and language choice.
- A deployment at one real museum, gallery or university heritage collection, tested with at least 15 visitors.
If you have time left
- Offline caching with a service worker for sites with weak signal.
- A trail mode that suggests the next exhibit and awards a stamp at each one.
- Photogrammetry of one real artefact to replace a placeholder model.
The problem: small museums with stories nobody reads
Big national museums have audio guides, apps and interactive screens. Small city museums, heritage houses, university collections and archaeological site museums usually have glass cases and a printed label, often in one language. Visitors, especially students and families, walk past objects whose stories are fascinating but invisible. The staff know the stories; they lack a cheap way to tell them.
Building a native app is out of reach for most of these institutions: it costs money to develop, must be maintained on two platforms, and visitors will not download an app for a single visit.
What already exists and the gap
- Smartify offers museum guides with artwork recognition, audio tours and AR for many large institutions.
- Bloomberg Connects is a free digital guide app funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies for a large number of cultural organisations, by application.
- Artivive lets artists and galleries add AR animations to artworks through its app.
These are good products, but most depend on a native app, on being accepted into a programme, or on an English-first content model. The gap is a web-only, bilingual AR guide that a small museum's own staff can update, that works through a QR code and falls back gracefully on older phones. Open source image tracking such as MindAR makes this possible without paid SDKs.
What you build
Visitors scan a QR code next to an exhibit. The page asks for camera permission and recognises the object or its panel. A 3D reconstruction appears on top (a broken pot shown whole, a building shown as it once stood), with a play button for narration and a language toggle. On a phone without AR support, the same page shows the model in a normal 3D viewer with audio and text.
Curators log in to the CMS, photograph the target, upload the model and audio, write the story in two languages, preview on their phone and publish. The page is regenerated and the image target compiled.
The technically interesting part
For a beginner project the challenge is reliability in real conditions. Image tracking struggles with glass reflections, low light, small labels and objects that look similar. You will learn to pick good targets (panels with texture rather than plain objects), test tracking stability, and design the content so it still works when tracking is lost. Performance is the other challenge: 3D models and audio must load quickly on mid-range phones over mobile data, so you will measure and compress.
Show evaluators the tracking success rate per exhibit and the page load budget, not just a demo video.
How to evaluate it
- Tracking: for each exhibit, the percentage of attempts where tracking locks within 3 seconds, tested by several people and phones at the real site.
- Performance: time to first AR frame and total page weight per exhibit.
- Curator usability: time for a staff member to add a new exhibit on their own.
- Visitors: at least 15 visitors use the guide; record exhibits viewed, time spent and a short survey on what they remembered.
Suggested plan
- Weeks 1 to 2: find a museum or heritage collection, choose 8 exhibits, collect stories.
- Weeks 3 to 5: MindAR prototype with one target and one model; test on site.
- Weeks 6 to 8: content for all exhibits, bilingual text and audio, fallback viewer.
- Weeks 9 to 11: curator CMS with upload, preview and publish.
- Weeks 12 to 14: analytics, on-site visitor test, report.
Path to a product
The first customer is a small museum, gallery or university collection. Offer setup plus a low annual hosting fee, or charge per exhibit. Tourism departments and heritage trusts fund projects like this for multiple sites, which is the route to scale. The same tool fits trade fairs, schools and brand exhibitions.
Scope warning
Do not build a native app, indoor navigation or a social feature. Do not model every artefact yourself; use a few reconstructions and simple models. Eight exhibits that track reliably with good stories beat fifty that flicker.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- Frontend roadmap : the JavaScript and browser APIs behind a web AR page.
- Blender : simplifying and exporting models for the web.
- Supabase Documentation : auth, storage and database for the curator CMS.
- Learn Accessibility : making the guide usable with audio and large text.
- Fullstack cheat sheet : wiring the CMS and public pages together.
Get help with this idea
Museum partners are usually happy to help students, but they need clear expectations and a demo early. Bring your proposal and we can agree the scope, pick a stack your team can finish with, and design an evaluation your panel will respect. You build it; we help you make the calls.
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