In-Gallery with Guru

A successful digital layer meets visitors where they are, in the medium that fits the moment. Sometimes that’s a personal device, sometimes an anchored tablet, and sometimes a kiosk or other in-gallery device. At Guru, we’ve worked with all of these to create in-gallery experiences that don’t just wow — they make the visitor part of the fun.

If you’re curious what’s possible out of the box, our features page walks through the tools museums use most for visitor engagement and operations.

Active Visitors are Engaged Visitors

A study by the Association of Science-Technology Centers found that visitors who interacted with exhibits retained more information than those who only observed. Engaging with learning techniques is not only fun but effective. Including visitors in their own experience pays off in a few ways:

• Increased stay times: Engaged visitors, especially children, tend to linger longer in exhibits when they can interact, leading to more time spent learning.
• Improved understanding: Hands-on experiences help visitors "grasp things by grasping things," providing a tangible way to understand complex ideas.
• Stronger connections: Visitors feel more connected to the displays when they can personally interact with them.

How We Help Visitors Connect

Here are a few of the interactives we’ve created with museum partners.

User-Generated Stories

Visitors will make things, given a way to do it. In one exhibition deployment of this platform, visitors published 116 stories in about ten weeks; 93% carried a visitor audio recording and 97% a photograph, and more than half of the published stories were then read by other visitors.

A user-generated storytelling platform allows visitors to submit a personal audio/video recording and/or image, which they can then edit prior to submission. After submission, visitors’ stories are published by museum staff. Stories can be displayed via kiosk, tablet, or web page for other visitors to explore and enjoy. Stories can be curated and themed to correlate with an exhibition, artwork, artifact, or object. Visitors can access stories via interactive map, categories, or whatever you dream up!

At SFMOMA, Guru helped create an in-gallery digital engagement experience designed to deepen personal connection and provide an outlet for community expression related to the Ruth Asawa Exhibition.

Explore Ruth Asawa Experience

Drawing Feature

For use on in-gallery tablets, Guru created a user-friendly drawing tool that deepens visitor engagement via play. Utilizing the unique style of artists throughout history, this tool allows visitors to create and share their own digital artwork inspired by the greats.

Learn more about working with Guru

Timeline Game

Reminiscent of a weekly newspaper puzzle, visitors and fans of your institution can test their knowledge of its history. Presented with a clue, visitors must identify where in the timeline an event in a museum’s history took place. This experience can be used in gallery via tablets and via smartphone at home.

Get in touch with our team

These are exactly the kinds of challenges our museum solutions are designed to solve — bridging visitor experience goals with practical, manageable technology.

Read more insights from the Guru team

• YOUR Visitor Experience. YOUR Way.
• The Visitor Experience Advantage: Fully Branded Apps vs. Shared Platforms
• Catch up on Guru’s Key Takeaways