Talk your way round: a speech interface to a virtual museum

Purpose: To explore the development of a speech interface to a Virtual World and to consider its relevance for disabled users. Method: The system was developed using mainly software that is available at minimal cost. How well the system functioned was assessed by measuring the number of times a group of users with a range of voices had to repeat commands in order for them to be successfully recognised. During an initial session, these users were asked to use the system with no instruction to see how easy this was. Results: Most of the spoken commands had to be repeated less than twice on average for successful recognition. For a set of ‘teleportation’ commands this figure was higher (2.4), but it was clear why this was so and could easily be rectified. The system was easy to use without instruction. Comments on the system were generally positive. Conclusions: While the system has some limitations, a Virtual World with a reasonably reliable speech interface has been developed almost entirely from software which is available at minimal cost. Improvements and further testing are considered. Such a system would clearly improve access to Virtual Reality technologies for those without the skills or physical ability to use a standard keyboard and mouse. It is an example of both Assistive Technology and Universal Design

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

A student-led comparison of techniques for augmenting the field experience

We report a study in which 30 university geography students compared five techniques to enhance the experience of visiting outdoor locations. The techniques were: a pre-prepared acetate overlay of the visual scene; a custom-designed visitor guide running on a PDA; the mScape location-based software running on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted virtual reality display. The students were given the assignment as part of their assessed coursework for a field trip to the UK Lake District, where they had to evaluate the techniques and propose improvements or future designs to enable tourists or students on field trips to gain an enhanced understanding of their surroundings. The paper describes these techniques, reports the process and results of the student assignment, and concludes with a discussion of some broader issues emerging from the project

Running an open MOOC on learning in laboratories

CONTEXT Teaching in laboratories plays an integral role in education. This includes both proximal as well as remote laboratories. In many instances, learning activities are designed around equipment and traditional laboratory activities. Pedagogical aspects and instructional design are often not considered or are an afterthought. PURPOSE The aim of this project was to help to address this gap by designing, implementing and facilitating an open online course on the pedagogy of using laboratory experiences in the curriculum. APPROACH The MOOC for Enhancing Laboratory Learning Outcomes (MELLO) has been designed to assist educators at all levels, from schools to universities, to improve the quality of laboratory experiences in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education. Experienced educators seeking to review and revise current practices or beginning educators were all welcome to participate. Based on learning theory and research literature, online course has been developed that covers constructive alignment of practical activities with the wider curriculum, learning objectives, pedagogical approaches to laboratory learning, laboratory modalities and session planning. RESULTS 120 participants from Australia and around the world took part in the course. While the participants did not work on their own laboratory activity throughout the courses (as envisaged when designing the course), participants who actively took part in the course were positive about the value of the course. CONCLUSIONS The MOOC has been capable of supporting a large number of participants including university educators around the world who use laboratory experiences and will continue to do so through future iterations of the course. Moving forward, there is scope to adapt the pedagogical approach of the course to cater for the way the participants have engaged with the material

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Pervasive Gaming: Testing Future Context Aware Applications

More and more technical research projects take place that weave together elements of real and virtual life to provide a new experience defined as pervasive. They bank on the development of mobile services to drive the expansion of pervasive applications and in particular pervasive games. Using geolocalisation, local networks and short range radio frequencies technologies like RFID or other tagging technologies, pervasive games rely on a close relationship to the environment and thus explore the space between fiction and reality. This is their main quality but possibly their main weakness as the development relies on the production of specific contents in relation to the context of use. In this article, we propose to explore what this entirely new paradigm for game design implies in terms of production and how to overcome the limitations due to this dependency of contents and context. Based on our experience of three pervasive games developed within research projects on adhoc wifi (ANR-Safari and ANRTranshumance) and RFID networks (ANR-PLUG), this paper presents different options to reducing the cost of content production relying on either traditional editors or grass root contributions.pervasive games, content production, game design, geolocalised technologies.