RHINO-AR: An Augmented Reality Exhibit for Teaching Mobile Robotics Concepts in Museums

TL;DR

RHINO-AR is an augmented reality museum exhibit that enhances understanding of mobile robotics by integrating virtual robots into real museum spaces, improving visitor engagement and comprehension.

Contribution

This work introduces RHINO-AR, a novel AR system that places virtual robots in real environments, bridging the gap between virtual and physical exhibits for educational purposes.

Findings

RHINO-AR was well received by visitors.

It effectively conveyed key navigation concepts.

Visitors preferred RHINO-AR over VR due to realism.

Abstract

We present RHINO-AR, an interactive Augmented Reality (AR) museum exhibit that reintroduces the historical mobile robot RHINO into its original exhibition environment at the Deutsches Museum Bonn. The system builds on our previous work RHINO-VR, which reconstructed the robot and the environment in virtual reality. Although this created an engaging experience, it also revealed an important limitation, because visitors were separated from the real exhibition space and from the physical robot on display. RHINO-AR addresses this reality gap by placing a virtual reconstruction of the robot directly into the real museum space. Implemented on a Magic Leap~2 headset using Unity, our system combines real-time environment meshing with interactive visualizations of LiDAR sensing, traversability, and path planning to make otherwise invisible robotics processes understandable to non-expert visitors. We evaluated RHINO-AR in a two-day museum study with 22 participants, assessing usability, technical performance, satisfaction, conceptual understanding, and preference comparison to RHINO-VR. The results show that RHINO-AR was well received, effectively conveyed key navigation concepts, and generally preferred over the VR exhibit due to its stronger physical grounding and increased realism.