13 research outputs found
Interactions around a contextually embedded system
This paper discusses observations of visitor interactions around a museum installation, focusing on how physical setup and shape of two variants of the installation, a telescope-like viewer and a barrier-free screen, shaped visitor experiences and interactions around and with the system. The analysis investigates contextual embedding, and how the two system variants affected people's ability of sharing the experience and negotiating use
Rethinking 'multi-user': an in-the-wild study of how groups approach a walk-up-and-use tabletop interface
Multi-touch tabletops have been much heralded as an innovative technology that can facilitate new ways of group working. However, there is little evidence of these materialising outside of research lab settings. We present the findings of a 5-week in-the-wild study examining how a shared planning application â designed to run on a walk-up- and-use tabletop â was used when placed in a tourist information centre. We describe how groups approached, congregated and interacted with it and the social interactions that took place â noting how they were quite different from research findings describing the ways groups work around a tabletop in lab settings. We discuss the implications of such situated group work for designing collaborative tabletop applications for use in public settings
Multi-touch interfaces in museum spaces: reporting preliminary findings on the nature of interaction
For the past twenty years there has been a slow trickle of research disseminated through a variety of channels on the nature and use of computer interactives within museum and gallery environments. This research has yet to be consolidated into a robust and coherent evidence base for considering and understanding the continued investment in such interactives by institutions. Simultaneously however, the technology has changed almost beyond recognition from early kiosk-based computer exhibits featuring mostly film and audio content, through to the newer generation of multi-touch interfaces being introduced in the UK and beyond. This paper seeks to establish what can be gleaned from prior research in the field of computer interactives, to inform the study of these latest technological forms. It reports preliminary observations from the study of multi-touch interfaces and discusses issues identified for their continued investigation; principally, asking questions about the nature of experience and interactivity in such encounters and the research methods that we might use to better explore and understand their use in the future
Through the Loupe : Visitor engagement with a primarily text-based handheld AR application
The use of Augmented Reality (AR) in a museum or heritage setting holds great potential. However, until now, introducing AR into their buildings has been prohibitively expensive for most museums. On the one hand, programming the AR application could not be done in-house and would be rather costly. Secondly, the time-consuming production of high-quality digital visuals, often used in AR installations, needed to be outsourced. With the arrival of several AR engines, creating the actual experience has become easy, relatively fast and cheap, meaning the costs and skills associated with content creation might be the prime reason for particularly small and medium sized museums to not engage with the use of AR. This begs the question: Can other, simpler, types of content, such as texts, also be used to create a valued AR interpretation tool? This paper will discuss a study that has made a first attempt to answering this question. In addition, it explored the role AR can play in improving engagement between visitor, the object and its related information. The Loupe is a handheld AR application that was designed and tested as part of the meSch project. For this study, content, mainly consisting of text, was created for the Loupe at the Allard Pierson Museum. The tool was then tested with 22 participants who were asked to use the Loupe, either alone or together. Through questionnaires, observations and interviews, participants' engagement with and response to the Loupe were analyzed. This paper will discuss the findings of that study, focusing on the way the Loupe influenced the relationship between visitor and object, as well as the value of textual content as part of such an AR tool
"I don't understand it either, but it is cool" - visitor interactions with a multi-touch table in a museum
Most tabletop research presents findings from lab-based user studies, focusing on specific interaction techniques. This means we still know little about how these new interfaces perform in real life settings and how users appropriate them. This paper presents findings from a field study of an existing interactive table in a museum of natural history. Visitors were found to employ a wide variety of gestures for interacting; different interface elements invited different types of gesture. The analysis highlights challenges and design conflicts in the design of tabletop interfaces for public settings, such as latency times and side-effects of âframe-lessâ content, which had some users struggling to learn how to interact. While the majority of visitors engaged at least briefly with the table, which enabled browsing question-answer text about animal species, talk amongst visitors dealt mainly with how to interact and evoked few comments, indicating shallow engagement with content
Contributions from visitor research to CI and ICT4D theory and research methodology
The case study involved the evaluation of a single science centre exhibit in a number of
different science centres in a developing country. This illustrates the lessons that Community
Informatics and ICT for Development researchers can learn from âVisitor Researchâ theory
and methods. The three contexts identified in The Contextual Model of Learning are seen to
shed light on the research process as well as to its original purpose, free-choice learning. A
multi-methodological research approach was used and each science centre was described
separately so that the different levels of context could be taken into account.http://www.ci-journal.netam2016Informatic
Designing for Shareable Interfaces in the Wild
Despite excitement about the potential of interactive tabletops to support collaborative work, there have been few empirical demonstrations of their effectiveness (Marshall et al., 2011). In particular, while lab-based studies have explored the effects of individual design features, there has been a dearth of studies evaluating the success of systems in the wild. For this technology to be of value, designers and systems builders require a better understanding of how to develop and evaluate tabletop applications to be deployed in real world settings.
This dissertation reports on two systems designed through a process that incorporated ethnography-style observations, iterative design and in the wild evaluation. The first study focused on collaborative learning in a medical setting. To address the fact that visitors to a hospital emergency ward were leaving with an incomplete understanding of their diagnosis and treatment, a system was prototyped in a working Emergency Room (ER) with doctors and patients. The system was found to be helpful but adoption issues hampered its impact. The second study focused on a planning application for visitors to a tourist information centre. Issues and opportunities for a successful, contextually-fitted system were addressed and it was found to be effective in supporting group planning activities by novice users, in particular, facilitating usersâ first experiences, providing effective signage and offering assistance to guide the user through the application.
This dissertation contributes to understanding of multi-user systems through literature review of tabletop systems, collaborative tasks, design frameworks and evaluation of prototypes. Some support was found for the claim that tabletops are a useful technology for collaboration, and several issues were discussed. Contributions to understanding in this field are delivered through design guidelines, heuristics, frameworks, and recommendations, in addition to the two case studies to help guide future tabletop system creators
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The interactive museum experience: investigating experiential tendencies and audience focus in the Galleries of Modern London and the High Arctic exhibition
Although there are many studies on interactivity in museums in terms of enhancing learning, achieving educational objectives, structuring and orchestrating visitor engagement, democratising knowledge, exploring social interaction and bringing more audiences in to the museum space, they often do not take the multifaceted nature and context-dependency of interactivity into account. Throughout the thesis, I argue that the practice of digital interactivity in museum spaces should not be fetishized, but it must be examined and understood, depending on the context and the setting it takes place in. The approach undertaken in this study brings philosophical and theoretical perspectives on physical, emotional and technological interactivity and its multiple threads into dialogue with ethnographic research in two exhibition spaces: the permanent Galleries of Modern London, at the Museum of London, and the temporary High Arctic exhibition, at the National Maritime Museum, London. The study extends existing literature in two respects. First, attention is paid to the concerns reflected in different approaches to the digital interactivity in museum spaces: I term factual and poetic interactivity as two techniques and forms directly related to the empirical examples. The analysis and this distinction offer a platform to theorise and discuss nuances and tendencies of digital interactivity in museum spaces. Second, it identifies the multiplicity of modes of interactivity as perceived by visitors and museum professionals in and around two museums, foregrounding not only the technological aspect, but also the content and the processes of interaction through sensorial and embodied means such as touch, play and immersion. Together, the findings foreground and engage with an approach to digital interactivity, which discusses how a complex assemblage of institutional practices, multisensory experiences, and affective and cognitive dimensions are at work and at play in digitally mediated environments.
Keywords: museums, digital interactivity, experience, audience, visitor