Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of 9 situated play within a museum through the study of a 10 museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

Abstract This paper explores the design issues of situated play within a museum through the study of a museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts

Ec(h)o: Situated play in a tangible and audio museum guide

In this paper we discuss an adaptive museum guide prototype in which playfulness is a key design goal for the interaction experience. The interface for our prototype is a combined tangible user interface and audio display. We discuss how we determined the specific requirements for play through an ethnographic study and analysis based on ecological concepts of Bell and Nardi & O’Day. We found that we could consider play in two main forms in regard to the interface: content and physical play. We also found that play is highly contextual. Designers need to consider the situated nature of play for two reasons: 1) to best serve the overall design purpose; 2) in order to understand the nature and degree of play required. We augmented traditional user experience evaluation methods of questionnaires and interviews with observational analysis based on Djajadiningrat’s descriptions of aesthetic interaction

Situating approaches to interactive museum guides

This paper examines the current state of museum guide technologies and applications in order to develop an analytical foundation for future research on an adaptive museum guide for families. The analysis focuses on three critical areas of interest in considering group and social interaction in museums: tangibility the role of tangible user interfaces; interaction visit types and visit flows; and adaptivity user modeling approaches. It concludes with a discussion of four interrelated trajectories for interactive museum guide research including embodied interaction, gameplay, transparent and opaque interaction and the role of personal digital assistants

Ontology-based user modeling in an augmented audio reality system for museums

Ubiquitous computing is a challenging area that allows us to further our understanding and techniques of context-aware and adaptive systems. Among the challenges is the general problem of capturing the larger context in interaction from the perspective of user modeling and human–computer interaction (HCI). The imperative to address this issue is great considering the emergence of ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. This paper provides an account of our addressing the specific problem of supporting functionality as well as the experience design issues related to museum visits through user modeling in combination with an audio augmented reality and tangible user interface system. This paper details our deployment and evaluation of ec(h)o – an augmented audio reality system for museums. We explore the possibility of supporting a context-aware adaptive system by linking environment, interaction object and users at an abstract semantic level instead of at the content level. From the user modeling perspective ec(h)o is a knowledge based recommender system. In this paper we present our findings from user testing and how our approach works well with an audio and tangible user interface within a ubiquitous computing system. We conclude by showing where further research is needed

Situating approaches to museum guides for families and groups

In this paper, we analyze the current state of museum guide technologies and applications in order to develop an analytical foundation for our future research in an adaptive museum guide for families. We have focused our analysis on three critical areas of interest in considering group and social interaction in museums: tangibility, the role of tangible user interfaces; interaction, visit types and visit flows; adaptivity, user modeling approaches

From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work

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

Interactions around a contextually embedded system

This paper discusses observations of visitor interactions around a museum installation, focusing on how physical setup and shape of two variants of the installation, a telescope-like viewer and a barrier-free screen, shaped visitor experiences and interactions around and with the system. The analysis investigates contextual embedding, and how the two system variants affected people's ability of sharing the experience and negotiating use

Kurio: A museum guide for families

We discuss three design strategies for improving the quality of social interaction and learning with interactive museum guides: 1) embodied interaction; 2) game-learning; 3) a hybrid system. We used these strategies in our prototype Kurio, which is aimed at supporting families visiting museums. The results of our evaluation show positive implications of implementing the design strategies: closing the social gap, naturalizing technology, and supporting exploration and discovery in learning