664 research outputs found

    Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

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    Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

    A systematic literature review of Gamification in Cultural Heritage: Where are we? Where do we go?

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    Gamification has become an important tool in many organizations and fields of study. Despite the growing body of work, there are still many open paths for new research. This paper aims look at the uses of Gamification in the field of Cultural Heritage, to take account of where the research is and to point the open paths for the future in a post pandemic word. To do this, this paper presents a systematic literature review on Gamification in Cultural Heritage. While other endeavors have been conducted by other authors to map out the field, the scope of this study aimed to be much broader. The goal was to understand who the main actors with publications in the field are, as well as for what purposes and to what forms of Heritage is gamification being applied to. The findings indicate that European institutions are the main publishers of research on Gamification in Heritage, with the field still being dotted with incidental, one-time, studies. Whist intangible forms of Heritage are gaining ground in the use of Gamification, the field is largely dominated by GLAM institutions and groupings of mutually diverse Cultural Heritage assets, such as in tourist destinations. This paper also argues for more substantial networks and collaborative work between researchers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Playing Games with Tito:Designing Hybrid Museum Experiences for Critical Play

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    This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges

    Exploration Systems:Using Experience Technologies in Automated Exhibition Sites

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    Games design as a curatorial intervention: Rethinking museum representation, meaning-making and agency with games design

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    This thesis contributes to the academic fields of Museum Studies and Game Studies by rethinking the application of games, play and design in museums. I propose and document the applicability of games design with museum visitors as a creative and visual methodology. Building upon established Museum Studies, games, play and design theories, power and agency theories and Multimodal Social Semiotics, I conceptualise games design as an active curatorial intervention in representation, meaning-making and agency. Drawing on data collected during two case studies, I examine and describe step by step how families with young people design games inspired by museums and their collections. As part of the research process, two workshops were designed and implemented in two different museums in the UK. Bringing together theories from the fields of Museum Studies, Game Studies, Platform Studies and Museum Distributed Network theories and Multimodal Social Semiotics, I read visitors’ games as curatorial platforms that challenge, add and transform the context within which they are situated, designed and played. This thesis maps out and highlights the potential of games design as a creative and visual methodology. It provides new and important insights into the much-debated question of museum representation, the notion and ethics of the playful and participatory museum and the role that games as media can play in the relation between museums and their communities. Its findings show that games design with visitors offers museum practice and academia the methodology to rethink issues of curation, representation, meaning-making and agency. Games design with visitors as a curatorial intervention allows museums to recognise and empower the production of alternative classifications that add new layers of playful representations and meanings to the authentic museum curation. In this way, new paths of encountering and experiencing the tangible and intangible heritage and natural history are created allowing visitors to play and experiment with meaning and representation in the museum setting. These findings make a significant contribution to the literature of Game Studies. By proposing and applying games design as a participatory curatorial intervention in museums, this thesis introduces and documents the value of games as media beyond their current entertainment and educational application. In this way, the findings in this study extend the understanding of how game studies and games culture contribute to other academic fields and practices

    Interactive installation for museum, Move or Die: Influence of embodied interaction on players’ experience.

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    This thesis presents the interactive game installation, Move or Die, created for an exhibit at The Finnish Museum of Natural History. It documents the development of the project by describing ideas behind the concept, detailed components of the installation, and reasons for the design decisions made during the production process. For the theoretical section, the thesis investigates the influence of physical interaction on the players’ experience based on the embodied approach. The museum context is considered a great deal in both the production and theory sections. Move or Die is a gamified installation in which participants can save endangered species through bodily interaction. As the 'game' is projected onto the floor and Kinect sensors installed on the ceiling register movement, participants can catch and move the graphic animals on the floor by using their arms. Move or Die reflects a research method of the museum called 'assisted migration' and contains their research contents. It is designed to inform people of the situation of the endangered species and to offer participatory experience to the visitors at the same time. It is the objective of Move or Die to simulate the experience of saving endangered species with the player’s own intention and physical ability. Therefore, to investigate the interaction of Move or Die, it is significant to understand the players’ experience. To analyze this interaction, three representa- tive aspects of the interaction are discussed separately: full- body interaction, social interaction, and reality-based interaction. This thesis tries to uncover comprehensive influences of the interaction beyond its basic functionality

    Interactive Experience Design: Integrated and Tangible Storytelling with Maritime Museum Artefacts

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    Museums play the role of intermediary between cultural heritage and visitors, and are often described as places and environments for education and enjoyment. The European Union also encourages innovative uses of museums to support education through the cultural heritage resources. However, the importance of visitors’ active role in museums as places for education and entertainment, on the one hand, and the growing and indispensable presence of technology in the cultural heritage domain, on the other hand, provided the initial ideas to develop the research. This thesis, presents the study and design for an interactive storytelling installation for a maritime museum. The installation is designed to integrate different museum artefacts into the storytelling system to enrich the visitors experience through tangible storytelling. The project was conducted in collaboration with another PhD student, Luca Ciotoli. His contribution was mainly focused on the narrative and storytelling features of the research, while my contribution was focused on the interaction- and technology-related features, including the design and implementation of the prototype. The research is deployed using a four-phase iterative approach. The first phase of the research, Study, deals with literature review and different studies to identify the requirements. The second phase, Design, determines the broad outlines of the project i.e., an interactive storytelling installation. The design phase includes interaction and museum experience design. We investigated different design approaches, e.g., interaction and museum experience design, to develop a conceptual design. The third phase, prototype, allows us to determine how to fulfill the tasks and meet the requirements that are established for the research. Prototyping involves content creation, storyboarding, integrating augmented artefacts into the storytelling system. Th final phase, test, refers to the evaluations that are conducted during the aforementioned phases e.g., formative and the final usability testing with users. The outcome of the research confirms previous results in the literature about how digital narratives can be enriched with the tangible dimension, moreover it shows how this dimension can enable to communicate stories and knowledge of the past that are complex, such as the art of navigating in the past, by integrating tangible objects that play different roles in the storytelling process

    Hybrid Museum Experiences

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    "So you’re the one getting this gift? Lucky you! Someone who knows you has visited the museum. They searched out things they thought you would care about, and they took photos and left messages for you.” This is the welcoming message for the Gift app, designed to create a very personal museum visit. Hybrid Museum Experiences use new technologies to augment, expand or alter the physical experience of visiting the museum. They are designed to be experienced in close relation to the physical space and exhibit. In this book we discuss three forms of hybridity in museum experiences: incorporating the digital and the physical, creating social, yet personal and intimate experiences, and exploring ways to balance visitor participation and museum curation. The book reports on a three-year cross-disciplinary research project in which artists, design researchers and museum professionals have collaborated to create technology-mediated experiences that merge with the museum environment
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