Shanghai Museum Launches "AI Assistant" with SenseTime Leveraging AI to Create New Experiences in Cultural Venues

Hong Kong, October 22, 2025 — The Shanghai Museum East Building (Shanghai Museum East) and SenseTime have jointly developed and launched the AI Visitor Flow Intelligent Hub and AR+AI Navigation Platform, which acts as “AI Assistant” to cover tens of thousands of square meters of public space in Shanghai Museum East. Visitors can now activate AR real-scene navigation with one click on their mobile phones, and venue managers can check real-time, dynamically updated visitor flow of each exhibition hall to manage and regulate crowds efficiently.

The successful implementation of such a large-scale project has verified the value of the "AR+AI" integration model in the management and services of cultural venues.

This project has become one of the core applications of Shanghai Museum‘s "Smart 3M System”: AIM for Smart Conservation, BIM for Smart Management, and CIM for Smart Services.

How can AI solve the challenge of dense crowds in large spaces?

Covering a land area of 46,000 square meters with a building area of 123,000 square meters, Shanghai Museum East has about 20 exhibition halls. Located in Pudong New District, Shanghai, the museum has become a "treasure" in the hearts of countless people. Through its comprehensive, clearly structured, well-documented, and vividly narrated exhibitions, it presents the complete history of ancient Chinese art.

For large-scale cultural venues with complex spaces, the long-standing pain points include: visitors getting lost and struggling with navigation, uneven distribution of interpretation resources, and overcrowding in popular exhibition areas.

To address the operational challenges of Shanghai Museum East, such as its large exhibition area, numerous exhibition halls and artifacts, and high density of Visitor flow, SenseTime and Shanghai Museum have collaborated closely, integrating cutting-edge visual AI capabilities, AR technology with the service scenarios of cultural and museum venues, to develop an intelligent operation system featuring "efficient management, targeted services, and convenient experiences".

Through capabilities including centimeter-level indoor positioning, AR real-scene navigation, accurate statistics and visual management of overall visitor flow, and algorithm-based personalized navigation recommendations, the system alleviates visitors‘ pain points, such as easily getting lost during visits, long queues in popular exhibition areas, and confusion about visit directions.

SenseFoundry makes Visitor Flow Management more efficient

On the operational management side, SenseTime’s AI Visitor Flow Intelligent Hub acts as an "intelligent brain" for the venue.

Based on SenseFoundry‘s high-precision visual AI algorithms, this platform relies on a perception and computing power base formed by high-definition video streams and server clusters. Through a microservice architecture and dynamic scheduling mechanism, it can achieve second-level analysis and refresh under the condition of parallel multi-algorithm operation.

By accurately counting the number of visitors entering, exiting, and present in real time, the platform generates exhibition hall-level and even exhibit cabinet-level visitor flow density data and heatmaps with a granularity of 1–10 minutes, providing a visual management basis for the venue.

When there is a risk of overcrowding in a certain area, managers only need to take a look at the screen to clearly find out which exhibition hall is crowded and which exhibit cabinet has the most visitors waiting. This enables security personnel to intervene in advance for crowd dispersion and implement dynamic crowd control.

Combined with historical visitor flow data, venue staff can also optimize shift scheduling plans, significantly improving operational efficiency – not only greatly reducing the average waiting time for visitors during peak hours, but also increasing the venue‘s daily reception capacity.

The platform adopts structured attribute recognition and de-identification technologies. While ensuring refined visitor flow management, it strictly protects visitors‘ privacy and fully complies with national data security regulations.

"Directionally challenged" visitors can easily find their ways

On the visitor service side, the AR+AI Navigation Platform brings a new experience to visitors.

Relying on centimeter-level visual positioning and 3D spatial reconstruction, visitors only need to use the "AR Navigation" function in the "Shanghai Museum" WeChat Mini Program to realize real-scene navigation. This function allows precise positioning of target exhibition areas, cultural and creative product stores, as well as service facilities such as rest areas and water fountains, eliminating the trouble of finding directions.

More intelligently, the platform provides a dynamic intelligent recommendation mechanism by integrating reservation, visitor flow, and AR navigation behavior data.

Through comprehensive analysis of crowd portraits, historical trajectories, and real-time congestion, the platform offers personalized exhibition route recommendations for different groups of people: recommending interactive exhibition areas for parent-child families, planning in-depth appreciation routes for cultural relic enthusiasts, and guiding visitors to avoid high-density crowd areas. The platform effectively reduces unnecessary walking, greatly enhances the comfort of visits, and to a certain extent optimizes venue operational efficiency, realizing a smart visiting experience of "picking up your phone, walking, watching, and listening simultaneously".

The AI Visitor Flow Intelligent Hub and AR Navigation Platform have been deeply integrated into the "Smart 3M System" of Shanghai Museum East. The museum’s deployment of AI aligns with the national "AI +" Initiative, which aims to "expand new scenarios for service consumption" and "enhance the quality of cultural and entertainment services" through intelligentization. The project demonstrates how technology can empower cultural consumption, and provides a replicable and scalable benchmark for advancing smart cultural tourism and the digital transformation of urban public culture.

SenseTime leverages its original AI technologies to bring more convenient and vivid cultural experiences to the public. In the future, SenseTime will continue to expand the application boundaries of "AI +", extend its mature technical capabilities and solutions to more scenarios, and provide strong support for more managers to solve operational challenges and improve management efficiency, contributing to technological innovation and intelligent upgrading of industries.