"Rebuild Palmyra?" is a multimedia exhibition about the ancient city of Palmyra, its destruction by Daesh, and the question of whether it should be rebuilt. As such, it tackles today's pressing question of how humanity should deal with the destruction of cultural heritage. In the design of the exhibition, we pursued the Blended Museum approach, in which we strive to seamlessly integrate interactive media into exhibition design to increase the overall visitor experience. In this work, we present the exhibition, which consists of four rooms. We focus on three interactive installations in which the topic of reconstructing Palmyra is mediated using new technologies such as 3D Printing, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. The installations helped visitors in developing their own point of view on the question of rebuilding Palmyra. Lastly, we provide insights into the technical implementation of the installations and discuss the results of quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Contemporary exhibitions are increasingly staged using extensive and often interactive media. To create such exhibitions, exhibition design companies employ professionals from a wide range of different disciplines. The support of interdisciplinary exhibition designers in the design process is one goal of research in Human-Computer Interaction. This includes the deployment of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Tools that enable professionals from all disciplines involved to design and create interactive media themselves. In this paper, we will present Argus Vision, a DIY Tool, which allows exhibition designers the use of camera-tracking to rapidly prototype and develop immersive exhibitions and interactive installations. We successfully used Argus Vision in two real-world case studies both in the prototyping and in the deployment of two installations in exhibitions. Additionally, we conducted expert interviews with exhibition designers, investigating the tool’s usefulness for them.

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