Multilingual audio guides are a notorious cost center for museums, often taking months and costing over $20,000 to produce for a single temporary exhibition. When the Oita Prefectural Art Museum (OPAM) prepared for its tenth anniversary exhibition, "Sparkling Japanese Art: Treasures of 1300 Years" (OPAM開館10周年記念 きらめく日本美術 1300年の至宝展), they used Laxy to bypass this traditional workflow.
The exhibition spanned 1300 years of Japanese art, from ancient relics to early modern works. It focused on regional history in Oita, including Hachiman faith, Zen Buddhism, and Nanban (Western) art.
Laxy provided digital guides for 20 artworks in five languages: Japanese, English, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. Each guide combined text, audio narration, and images, serving them directly to visitors on their own phones.
We built Laxy because international travelers deserve to understand the history of the places they visit. By helping people access these stories in their native languages, we want to make cultural tourism more accessible without relying on expensive hardware rentals.
Instead of managing translation agencies and recording studios for weeks, museums can upload existing curation notes and generate audio guides in minutes. This changes how curators connect with international visitors, letting them launch multilingual content instantly.
We want to thank the Oita Prefectural Art Museum (OPAM) team for partnering with us on this project. It was a great opportunity to show how automated guides can improve accessibility in major galleries. We are currently preparing guides for several new sites.
If you manage a museum, gallery, or historical site and want to add multilingual guides without the high production costs. Contact ARUO at hello@aruo.tech to talk through where your organization is and what the right next step looks like.