From exhibition boards to a mobile heritage application: a multimodal interpretation system for the Prussian Homage 1525
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Hybrid cultural-heritage exhibitions increasingly combine physical display, mobile access, audiovisual media, three-dimensional assets and accessibility services, yet the architecture connecting these layers is often under-documented. This article presents a design study of a multimodal digital interpretation system developed for the Prussian Homage 1525 exhibition at the Museum of the Battle of Grunwald. The system interprets the 1410–1525 sequence of Polish-Teutonic relations through a ruler-based narrative and adopts Jan Matejko’s history paintings as a culturally recognizable visual grammar. It links five physical boards to a web and Progressive Web App (PWA) environment and a Flutter mobile application through Quick Response (QR) codes, integrating text, easy-to-read text, audio, Polish Sign Language, video, quizzes and three-dimensional and augmented-reality assets. The article contributes: (1) a transferable architecture for connecting place-based history, mobile storytelling and accessible media; (2) a documented provenance and paradata model for AI-assisted 3D figures derived from public-domain paintings, including the generative services used and the production metadata that was not retained; (3) an optimization pipeline that reduced the sixteen referenced web GLB assets from a measured 148.98 MB to 14.89 MB (approximately 90%) and the eight referenced iOS USDZ assets from 421 MB to a measured 81.04 MB (80.7%) in the release build; and (4) the finding, obtained by re-measuring the same assets against the live server, that the optimized build is not what the production server delivers. As served on 12 September 2026, the sixteen referenced GLB files total 41.66 MB, the eight USDZ files 284.59 MB and the five sign-language videos 556.02 MB, and the service-worker precache silently caches nothing because its asset list no longer matches the deployed file names. We document three independent mechanisms by which a heritage system can diverge from its audited build, show that the divergence inverts the accessibility priorities the system was designed around, and propose a short post-deployment verification procedure that measures the production server rather than the build directory. The evidence reported here is architectural, provenance-related and infrastructural: build and live-server payload measurements, a static technical audit, an expert inspection and instrumented keyboard traversal of the deployed accessibility layer, analytical transfer-time estimates, and observational server-log evidence from 69 days of public operation. The study does not report a controlled visitor study, on-device timing or a certified accessibility audit; a pilot visitor-walkthrough protocol is specified as the defined next empirical step.
Authors: Cezary Kowalczyk, Rafał Kaźmierczak
Institution: University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,810
OpenAlex ID: W7224258860