Flying a drone in a museum: An augmented-reality cultural serious game in Provence

The Arlaten Museum is an ethnographic museum dedicated to the preservation of Provence heritage founded in 1899 in Arles (France) by the poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Frédéric Mistral. The museum, now under renovation, has an inner courtyard containing the remains of an ancient Roman Forum inscribed as World Heritage by UNESCO which will be closed to the public until the reopening in 2017. `Vol sans effraction´ is an innovative visitor experience which allows the public to discover the Roman Forum in an exclusive way through the use of digital technology and enables the museum to stay in touch with the public. The game takes place in the street outside the museum where the public can fly a small drone equipped with a camera flying inside the courtyard. Targets representing common beliefs about museums (boring, old, dusty, only for elites, etc.) have been placed in the Forum. The mission of the pilot standing in front of a screen consists in virtually shooting those clichés through image-detection algorithms and augmented-reality effects, in order to trigger short videos where the clichés are challenged by young speakers.