Archaelogical Museum of Thessaloniki
Interactive Digital Exhibitions and Visitor Engagement
Interactive Digital Exhibitions and Visitor Engagement
The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki (AMTh) holds one of the world’s preeminent collections of ancient Macedonian artefacts, and already leads the way in blending immersive digital media with a traditional gallery setting. Eleven multimedia installations run alongside the pioneering “Macedonia from Fragments to Pixels” exhibition, developed with the Ambient Intelligence Programme of ICS-FORTH, offering virtual replicas of artefacts and archaeological contexts through high-resolution touchscreens, cinematic projections and game-style interactions. Visitors can already explore the museum through a 12-language guided tour, an interactive guide in Greek Sign Language, AR/VR experiences of the Roman-era Galerius Palace Complex, an RFID-based digital tour, and an interactive social robot.
That’s already a rich, participatory visitor experience; but today it largely stays within the museum’s own systems and its physical walls. Pilot 1 is testing whether MNEME’s European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) can ingest, manage and share large-scale interactive exhibitions like these across institutional boundaries, making AMTh’s digital assets more discoverable, opening them to cross-institutional scholarship, and extending visitor engagement beyond the gallery itself.
What MNEME brings
The work starts with ingesting more than 300 digitized artefact records, 3D scans and interactive narrative modules into MNEME’s ECCCH instance, all semantically annotated to CIDOC-CRM standards so they connect automatically with related objects at Celje and Saint-Romain-en-Gal. AI pattern-recognition and style-analysis algorithms process high-resolution imagery and 3D geometry across categories of material, pottery, figurines, sculpture, coins, mosaics, textiles, monuments, generating contextual metadata and proposing links to comparable pieces at the other pilot sites.
Robotic photogrammetry is capturing new, high-fidelity 3D models of key exhibits, hosted as IIIF-compliant resources for real-time high-resolution viewing and panoramic rotation. An augmented reality application, available on-site via touch-screen and remotely through a web client, overlays virtual reconstructions of monuments onto physical spaces and mobile device cameras. Everything runs on containerized, Kubernetes-orchestrated services within the MNEME cloud, monitored to keep interactive modules loading in under two seconds with better than 99% uptime.
The experience
The demonstration plays out on-site and remotely. In the museum, visitors follow a curated “Digital Macedonian Experience” tour on a touch-screen or their own device, guided by AR to a virtual reconstruction of ancient Macedonian monuments. As they move through the galleries, contextual pop-ups surface related coins, figurines, vases and statues, with the option to compare them against similar finds at Celje and Saint-Romain-en-Gal; a hands-on look at how MNEME links collections across borders.
Remotely, registered educators and researchers can join the same interactive tour through the ECCCH web portal, taking part in a guided webinar where museum curators use the cloud’s recording and annotation tools to share interpretive insights in real time. Every interaction, hotspot selections, viewing durations, AR sessions, is logged to refine the experience going forward.
Goals for this pilot
At least 300 artefacts integrated with CIDOC-CRM metadata; a 15%+ increase in visitor dwell time at interactive stations; five or more staff proficient in ECCCH platform management, able to configure new exhibits and publish updates independently; three or more meaningful cross-collection semantic links per artefact; interactive content loading in under 2 seconds; 99%+ system uptime.