A Museum App to Trigger Users' Reflection

International audienceThis paper introduces a mobile museum guide that has been designed for the National Gallery in London with the special goal of triggering reflection of the visitor. We also present the results obtained from a first experiment. The underlying postulate is that visitors are more prone to reflection and more interested by the collection in a museum if they can discover it through other facets than those highlighted solely in the museum, and if this discovery is personalised for each of them. The smart guide includes means to personalise a visit by modelling the user preferences and behaviour, and builds recommendations for stories or groups of paintings based on the user profile and reflective topics

Together Yet Apart: Multimodal Representation Learning for Personalised Visual Art Recommendation

With the advent of digital media, the availability of art content has greatly expanded, making it increasingly challenging for individuals to discover and curate works that align with their personal preferences and taste. The task of providing accurate and personalised Visual Art (VA) recommendations is thus a complex one, requiring a deep understanding of the intricate interplay of multiple modalities such as images, textual descriptions, or other metadata. In this paper, we study the nuances of modalities involved in the VA domain (image and text) and how they can be effectively harnessed to provide a truly personalised art experience to users. Particularly, we develop four fusion-based multimodal VA recommendation pipelines and conduct a large-scale user-centric evaluation. Our results indicate that early fusion (i.e, joint multimodal learning of visual and textual features) is preferred over a late fusion of ranked paintings from unimodal models (state-of-the-art baselines) but only if the latent representation space of the multimodal painting embeddings is entangled. Our findings open a new perspective for a better representation learning in the VA RecSys domain

Reliving the experience of visiting a gallery : methods for evaluating informal learning in games for cultural heritage

When evaluating the effectiveness of gamified app experiences in cultural heritage venues in terms of informal learning outcomes, a core challenge is the complexity involved in assessing intangible measures such as visitors’ appraisal of artwork. A comprehensive summary of the literature for conducting museum visitor evaluations is needed in order to understand how to measure the impact of gamification on user engagement, and the enhancement of the cultural heritage experience on learning. This paper first reviews related literature regarding the application of intrusive versus nonintrusive user evaluation methods, focusing on the REMIND protocol for conducting experiments with museum visitors. We relay our findings when applying the REMIND protocol in four gamified cultural heritage applications in the CrossCult project. Focusing on the assessment of informal learning in an application specifically designed for the visitors of the National Gallery of London, the paper concludes with recommendations, challenges, and future steps in evaluating games for cultural heritage.peer-reviewe

Transforming visitor experience with museum technologies: The development and impact evaluation of a recommender system in a physical museum

Over the past few decades, many attempts have been made to develop recommender systems (RSs) that could improve visitor experience (VX) in physical museums. Nevertheless, to determine the effectiveness of a museum RS, studies often encompass system performance evaluations, e.g., user experience (UX) and accuracy level tests, and rarely extend to the VX realm that museum RSs aim to support. The reported challenges with defining and evaluating VX might explain why the evidence that the interaction with an RS during the visit can enhance the quality of VX remains limited. Without this evidence, however, the purpose of developing museum RSs and the benefits of using RSs during a museum visit are in question. This thesis interrogates whether and how museum RSs can impact VX. It first consolidates the literature about VX-related constructs into one coherent analytical framework of museum experience which delineates the scope of VX. Following this analysis, this research develops and validates a VX instrument with cognitive, introspective, restorative, and affective variables which could be used to evaluate VX with or without museum technologies. Then, through a series of UX- and VX-related studies in the physical museum, this research implements a fully working content-based RS and establishes how the interaction with the developed RS transforms VX. The findings in this thesis demonstrate that the impact of an RS on the quality of VX can depend on the level of engagement with the system during a museum visit. Additionally, the impact can be insufficient on some mental processes within VX, and it can vary following the changes in contextual variables. The findings also reinforce that system performance tests cannot replace a VX-focused analysis, because a positive UX and additional information about museum objects in an RS do not imply an improved VX. Therefore, this thesis underscores that more VX-related evaluations of museum RSs are required to identify how to strengthen and extend their influence on the quality of VX