Art Traffic at the Louvre: A Study of Visitors’ Behavior Using Bluetooth Data

w much time would you take to smile back at the Mona Lisa? Today, sophisticated Bluetooth signal tracking allows us to map how visitors move through a museum like the Louvre in Paris – what galleries they visit, what path they take, and how long they spend in front of each piece of artwork. Join us for a look inside one of the world’s largest museums…to see the people in front of the paintings.

Visitor behavior and experience are among the most important factors informing museum management, with proven value in enhancing operations – yet data is traditionally generated by observations and surveys. These means ascertain visitors’ mediated perspectives on personal experience. The recent emergence of ubiquitous technologies has revolutionized the process of collecting data on human behavior, yet new digital means of data collection do not preclude traditional approaches, each offering complementary value.

Consequently, the availability of large datasets based on quantified museum visitation patterns provides new opportunities to apply computational and comparative analytical techniques. In this pioneering study, we attempt to analyze visitors’ behavior in one of the world’s largest museums – The Louvre Museum – from anonymized longitudinal datasets generated by noninvasive Bluetooth sensors.

The analysis discovered that the visiting style of short-stay (less than 1:30 min) and long-stay (more than 6 hours) visitors are not significantly different. Visitors in both categories tend to visit a similar number of key locations in the museum, yet long-stay visitors tend to do so more extensively. This disproves our initial hypothesis that short-stay visitors explore fewer of the popular places due to the time constraints.
The trajectories of long-stay visitors were hypothesized to be more complex than those of the short-stay visitors, and vice versa. However, our analysis implies that visitors’ trajectories seem to be quite limited in terms of the path sequence length and its order, although there exist a number of possible routes (including the repetition of certain nodes – that is, visitors return to a piece of art multiple times during one visit).

Finally, when visitors are offered a greater number of spaces, they tend to follow more selective paths. That is, when the number of the rooms with exhibits increases, visitors seem not to visit all of the exhibits, but target only a few of them selectively. Most importantly, this pattern is almost independent from the duration of a visitor’s stay – regardless of how long they spend in the museum, visitors to use the same trajectories.