Empowering cultural heritage professionals with tools for authoring and deploying personalised visitor experiences

This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a co-design process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation

Use of Tools: UX Principles for Interactive Narrative Authoring Tools

The technology supporting Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) is of particular significance to cultural heritage research. IDN technology provides a means of engagement in cultural heritage sites, a medium for culturally significant stories, and culturally significant story-centric games. While previous work in this space has numerous examples of user experience (UX) evaluations of the interactive narrative works themselves, there is significantly less in terms of evaluation of technology for authoring IDN, creating a UX research space in this area that is focused on audience and not authors. We propose to balance this focus by considering the UX of authoring tools more closely. In this work, we undertake a review of the state of the art of authoring tools for IDN such as story-centric games, and report on a rigorous UX evaluation of representative technologies (n=21). We also address the challenges of UX research for these tools through an original evaluation methodology where authors complete a story composed of representative story features. Our study leads us to conclude 7 UX principles for IDN authoring tools that both explore how authors use tools to create story-focused games, and how the interface for these tools impacts the creative process

Empowering cultural heritage professionals with tools for authoring and deploying personalised visitor experiences

open2siThis paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a co-design process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation.openNot, Elena; Petrelli, DanielaNot, Elena; Petrelli, Daniel

Authoring tools for archaeological mobile guides

Mobile tourist guides are increasingly useful once the visitors are in the archaeological sites. They are capable of providing huge amount of information about the sites. As it is easily understood, the selection of such information is a task that must be conducted by cultural institutions. Therefore, this paper aims at simplifying the provision of useful multimedia information in a user-friendly and attractive way. In order to achieve this goal, an authoring tool for non-expert users has been implemented, so that they will be able to contribute to mobile guides independently from the structure and the type and formats of the contents that will be added.The tool includes the possibility of defining several layers to provide the information with a split architecture, so that the creator of the guide can decide which contents to include and the languages in which the guide will be provided. This tool has been validated in several archaeological sites in order to build interactive multilingual mobile guides based on the J2ME standard