Improving smart interactive experiences in cultural heritage through pattern recognition techniques

New Information and Communication Technologies have a large potential to improve general public awareness of the importance of Cultural Heritage (CH) and to provide tools that can make visits to historical sites more interesting and enjoyable. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology can further contribute to these goals, by allowing visitors to museum and CH sites to manipulate smart objects by receiving information that stimulates emotions, understanding and appropriation of the contents. In our research, interaction paradigms and innovative methods are developed to allow curators and guides of cultural sites (i.e., domain experts) to manage interactive IoT-based environments, in order to create Smart Interactive Experiences, which are usage situations created by synchronizing many available smart objects to specific situations that might better satisfy the needs of the visitors. This article illustrates a system that, by means of a tangible user interface, integrated by pattern recognition and computer vision techniques, supports CH experts in creating Smart Interactive Experiences by properly tailoring the behavior of the involved smart objects. An experimental evaluation of the used techniques has been performed and it is presented and discussed.