Mobile AI Guide — Museo Emilio Carafa

The totem guide had worked well at the Carafa opening, but it had a built-in limit: it lived in one spot, tied to a screen on a stand. Once we saw it in use, the next idea came almost on its own. How nice would it be if that same guide travelled with the visitor — something to carry through the museum and keep afterward on their own phone.

The ambition was to extend the totem into a mobile agent without splitting its personality in two. From the visitor's side it had to be exactly the same character — same voice, same knowledge, same tone — with the one difference that it was now within reach on a phone instead of a fixed screen in the hall.

Underneath, the mobile agent shares the totem's identity and the same database; the only thing that changes is the language-model integration that builds the answers. The visitor reaches it by scanning a QR code and starts talking straight from the phone's browser, with nothing to install.

The touch we were proudest of was a selective one. On the most iconic works, the label carries its own QR that opens the chat with a question already framed around the piece in front of you. We didn't do it for every work, and that was on purpose: a UX call to guide rather than overwhelm. Between the totem and the phone agent, a small ecosystem of agents took shape — one identity, two ways in.

The agent is reachable from a phone via QR, backed by the same curated database and the same restrictions as the totem. The pre-framed questions on key works turned passive scanning into an actual conversation — the smallest design decision in the project, and one of the most effective.