The Internet of speaking things and its applications to cultural heritage

The initial driver for the development of an Internet of Things (IoT) was to provide an infrastructure capable of turning anything into a sensor that acquires and pours data into the cloud, where they can be aggregated with other data and analysed to extract decision-supportive information. The validity of this initial motivation still stands. However, going in the opposite direction is at least as useful and exciting, by exploiting Internet to make things communicate and speak, thus complementing their capability to sense and listen. In this work we present applications of IoT aimed to support the Cultural Heritage environments, but also suitable for Tourism and Smart Urban environments, that advance the available user-experience based on smart devices via the interaction with speaking things. In the first place we describe a system architecture for speaking things, comprehensive of the basic communication protocols for carrying information to the user as well as of higher-level functionalities for content generation and dialogue management. We then show how this architecture is applied to make artworks speak to people. Finally, we introduce speaking holograms as a yet more advanced and interactive application.