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Technology can play a crucial role in supporting museum visitors and enhancing their overall museum visit experiences. Visitors coming to a museum do not want to be overloaded with information, but to receive the relevant information, learn, and have an overall interesting experience. To serve this goal, a user-friendly and flexible system is needed. The design of such a system poses several challenges that need to be addressed in parallel. The user interface should be intuitive and let the visitors focus on the exhibits, not on the technology. Content and delivery must provide relevant information and at the same time allow visitors to get the level of detail and the perspectives in which they are interested. Personalization may play a key role in providing relevant information to individuals. Yet, since visitors tend to visit the museum in small groups, technology should also contribute to and facilitate during-the-visit communication or post-visit group interaction. The PIL project applied at the Hecht museum extended the research results of the PEACH project and tried to address all of these considerations. Evaluation involving users substantiated several aspects of the design.

Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of the today mobile museum guides focus on supporting the individual visitor. The technology described in this paper allows supporting groups of visitors in addition to individuals by providing contextaware services aimed at supporting the whole group. These include context-aware communication and alerting services that are provided by the museum visitor's guide system developed in the framework of the PIL (PEACH-Israel) project, as an example case of a larger variety of possible context-aware services.

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