The EXPLOAR project demonstrates an innovative approach that involves visitors ofscience museums and science centres in extended episodes of playful learning. TheEXPLOAR approach looks upon informal education as an opportunity to transcend fromtraditional museum visits, to a "feel and interact" user experience, allowing for learning"anytime, anywhere", open to societal changes and at the same time feeling culturallyconscious. These pedagogical concepts and learning practices would addressimplementing a set of demonstrators (learning scenarios), employing advanced andhighly interactive visualization technologies and also personalised ubiquitous learningparadigms in order to enhance the effectiveness and quality of the learning process. Inthis way the proposed service demonstrates the potential of the augmented Reality (AR)technology to cover the emerging need of continuous update, innovate anddevelopment of new exhibits, new exhibitions, new educational materials, newprogrammes and methods to approach the visitors.The EXPLOAR system will offer unique learning opportunities to the science museumand the science centre visitor. A series of augmentations of physical phenomena,pictures, video and text will be presented to the visitor's optical view explaining thephysical laws and phenomena under investigation. The system will also support thework of the exhibition design and development team of the museum as it allows forenrichment of current exhibits with numerous applications and gadgets providing aneasy way to update and to innovate each exhibition. The proposed project builds uponthe RTD work performed in the previous years (2004-2007) in the framework of the verysuccessful IST project, CONNECT (www.connect-project.net) which is has developed apersonalized museum wearable system along with a long series of informal educationalscenarios for schools. The system was extensively tested and evaluated in sciencecentres in UK, Sweden, Greece and Finland with school students. In the framework ofthe proposed project the consortium aims to expand the application to a much widertarget audience, namely to all visitors of science centers and museums enriching therepertoire of learning opportunities supporting the challenge of "science for all", i.e.,providing science education opportunities tailored to diverse and heterogeneouspopulations of citizens. These populations vary both in their interest in learning scienceand in their abilities to learn science.Lifelong learning, museums and digital technologies share many of the same attributes,with emphasis on learning from objects (rather than about objects) and on strategiesfrom discovering information (rather than the information itself). The EXPLOAR projectis going to realise an extended validation of the service in real environment in Greeceand in Finland. Also validation activities are going to be implemented in several otherscience centres and museums (members of ECSITE) through the disseminationactivities of the project.