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

Re-using Digital Narrative Content in Interactive Games

This paper presents a model, called Scene-Driver, for the reuse of film and television material. We begin by exploring general issues surrounding the ways in which content can be sub-divided into meaningful units for re-use and how criteria might then be applied to the selection and ordering of these units. We also identify and discuss the different means by which a user might interact with the content to create novel and engaging experiences. The Scene-Driver model has been instantiated using content from an animated children’s television series called Tiny Planets, which is aimed at children of 5-7 years old. This type of material, being story-based itself, lends itself particularly well to the application of narrative constraints to scene reordering, to provide coherence to the experience of interacting with the content. We propose an interactive narrative-driven game architecture, in which a user generates novel narratives from existing content by placing “domino” like tiles. These tiles act as “glue” between scenes and each tile-choice dictates certain properties of the next scene to be shown within a game. There are three different game-types, based on three different ways in which tiles can be matched to scenes. We introduce algorithms for generating legal tile-sets for each of these three game-types, which can be extended to include narrative constraints. This ensures that all novel orderings adhere to a minimum narrative plan, which has been identified based on analysis of the Tiny Planets series and on narrative theories. We also suggest ways in which basic narratives can be enhanced by the inclusion of directorial techniques and by the use of more complex plot structures. In our evaluation studies with children in the target age-range, our game compared favourably with other games that the children enjoyed playing

Understanding and Telling Stories across Online and Real-world Cultural and Historical Artefacts

Storytelling is a natural way for humans to make sense of their world. Narratives structure experience into expected forms that improve understanding of relationships between discrete objects and events. This is the rationale behind museum curation, which organises objects in the physical museum space to reveal how they are related. This thesis explores how to support people to tell and experience narratives across multiple objects. For the online world, a model of curatorial inquiry is introduced which is designed to support a historical inquiry from online sources. This model extends existing inquiry models and is inspired by museum practice in which curators organize objects into museum narratives. For the physical world, a model is introduced that describes navigation through both the physical and conceptual neighbourhood of a set of objects. It is designed to support tourist activities across a non-portable set of cultural objects, such as statues, buildings, or landscape features. Key findings, based on both participant studies and analysis of data from Foursquare, is that while people are keen to understand stories that link places in a physical space, they prefer to navigate using physical, rather than conceptual proximity, and to visit places that are popular. This is counter to many mobile tour guides that focus on prompting navigation to similar places. The proposal of this thesis is therefore to develop applications that support tourists in understanding both what is physically nearby and conceptually nearby. This would allow them to use physical proximity - or any preferred alternative – to select where to go next, whilst supporting them to make links between the places they visit. In this way tourists would be provided with enough information about the relationships of places within a physical neighbourhood that they can start to understand and create their own stories about them

Museum, memories and digital stories : A liminal space for human computer interaction.

Objects, material or digital, mediate memories: they act as anchors in between temporal notions and relations of past and present. Through those objects of memory, the act of remembering occurs neither completely relived in the mind, nor fully captured in the medium. Essential to personal memories, objects represent also our collective memory and capture our social history.The papers submitted for this PhD by selected publications look at the design of innovative technology that can make remembering more evocative and affective. They look at both museums, where digital and material are combined in an augmented reality, and personal/family contexts, where the home and mundane objects can be technologically enhanced to encapsulate digital memories.The museum was ideal to experiment with hybrid settings that combine material (the collection and the architectural space) and digital (the information) (papers 1 to 3). Personalization of information was used to augment the reality of rooms and exhibits: whole body interaction (i.e. physical movements in the space) was used to select and personalize the content and engage visitors with both material (the object) and digital (the information). Although the mobile technology is dated, these papers show the value of combining digital and physical to provide a holistic experience that made visitors wonder. Where the fusion occurs, however, is in the digital technology. To balance this perspective, paper 4 looks at the effect of taking the digital content out into the exhibition space. My recent research (papers 5-9) looks at objects of memory in the personal realm, in particular in the family home. Starting from observing the role and function of mementos, I conclude that a more holistic and organic approach has to be taken to make personal digital objects of memory more present in people's life. Materialization can be achieved with digital devices designed for individual and family use, so that the product fits with the mundane aspects of life, is immediate, and stimulates affect, not efficiency.Finally papers 10 and 11 provide evidence of the innovative methodologies I have developed and successfully used in iterative user studies and evaluations across different research projects and many years of research. As a whole this submission shows that there is a huge design space to explore in looking at how technology could be used in public or private spaces to bring together the two aspects of memory: remembering in the mind and capturing through objects, in order to preserve our digital life as tangible interactive objects

Generation of Video Documentaries from Discourse Structures

Recent interests in the use of multimedia presentations and multimodal interfaces have raised the need for the automatic generation of graphics and especially temporal media. This paper presents an engine to build video documentaries from annotated audio commentaries. The engine, taking into consideration the discourse structure of the commentary, plans the segmentation in shots as well as the camera movements and decides the transition effects among shots. The output is a complete script of a "video presentation", with instructions for synchronizing images and movements with the playing of the audio commentary. The language of cinematography and a set of strategies similato to those used in documentaries are the absic resources to plan the animation. Strategies encompass constraints and conventions normally used in building video documentarie