Touching and interacting with inaccessible cultural heritage

International audienc

The Role of 3D Printed Facsimiles in Fulfilling Museum Visitors’ Desire to Touch

By nature, humans have a desire to touch the things they encounter in daily life. Museums are no exception to this desire, even though museum objects are rarely available for visitor handling. This thesis explores the question: “can accurate 3D printed facsimiles help fulfill the desire of visitors to touch museum objects?” For this project and case study, I selected, and 3D scanned a museum object, which was then recreated via 3D printing. The reproduction was then put on display alongside the original object, and a visitor study was conducted to see if interacting with the facsimile while seeing the original object satisfied the desire of the visitor to touch the object. From this study, I determined that the facsimile proved to be a satisfactory replacement for the original object in terms of touch – in this limited context. This research may be of use to museums and staff looking to meet visitor needs without compromising the institutional commitment to preservation, care, and stewardship of collections

Object Relations in the Museum: A Psychosocial Perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom

With new eyes I see: embodiment, empathy and silence in digital heritage interpretation

With New Eyes I See (WNEIS) was an immersive and itinerant digital heritage encounter exploring the exploitation of empathy made possible in such emergent formats. Located ‘in the wild’, and timed to coincide with the 2014 Centenary of the First World War, WNEIS transformed Cardiff’s civic centre as previously inaccessible stories and archival materials were projected onto, and playfully manipulated by, buildings and the natural environment. The research that underpinned the project unearthed a hitherto untold story about the experiences and fates of those who left their posts at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales to go and fight in WW1. Focusing on the story of Botanist Cyril Mortimer Green, and moving between past and present, known and unknown, presence and absence, participants encountered a re-scripting and multiple layering of the cityscape, and an uneasy archaeology of the museological endeavour. WNEIS foregrounded opportunities for touching, listening and feeling; as such it was a multimodal form of investigation for participants. This article uses focus group materials to explore the intersecting themes of ‘embodiment’, ‘empathy’ and ‘silence’ that emerged in reflections. It reveals an audience ready for digital cultural heritage that embraces ambiguity in the examination and negotiation of meaning

Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art

Tactile reliefs offer many benefits over the more classic raised line drawings or tactile diagrams, as depth, 3D shape, and surface textures are directly perceivable. Although often created for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, a wider range of people may benefit from such multimodal material. However, some reliefs are still difficult to understand without proper guidance or accompanying verbal descriptions, hindering autonomous exploration. In this work, we present a gesture-controlled interactive audio guide (IAG) based on recent low-cost depth cameras that can be operated directly with the hands on relief surfaces during tactile exploration. The interactively explorable, location-dependent verbal and captioned descriptions promise rapid tactile accessibility to 2.5D spatial information in a home or education setting, to online resources, or as a kiosk installation at public places. We present a working prototype, discuss design decisions, and present the results of two evaluation studies: the first with 13 BVI test users and the second follow-up study with 14 test users across a wide range of people with differences and difficulties associated with perception, memory, cognition, and communication. The participant-led research method of this latter study prompted new, significant and innovative developments

Blind and Partially Sighted People’s Motivation to Visit Museums: A London-based Case Study

In the UK, accessibility for blind and partially sighted people in museums and cultural heritage sites has seen substantial progress thanks to the civil rights movement and the Equality Act of 2010. In recent years, there has been significant development of projects in UK museums for disabled people that aim to be socially inclusive. The concept of “motivation”, coming from Museum Studies literature, is central to understanding blind and partially sighted visitors’ experiences. This paper aims to investigate the motivation and expectations of blind and partially sighted visitors, providing a general understanding of why they decide to visit museums and how accessible resources affect their experience. Findings show that participants have multiple motivations for visiting, and they do not consider different motivations to be conflicting. The social and educational aspects seemed to be the most valued elements regarding visitors’ experience. The analysis suggests clear links between the way participants use resources in the museum and their motivation for visiting museums. The results show that the use of accessible resources has the potential to enhance the museum experience of blind and partially sighted people

RAPID PROTOTYPING FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE ACCESSIBILITY TO CULTURAL HERITAGE FOR BLIND PEOPLE

Abstract. The extension of accessibility of CH to disabled people is a current topic of great importance. Today, there exist a lot of ongoing projects aimed at the extension of accessibility using the most recent and low cost technologies to improve accessibility to CH. One of the technologies, today available that can help to improve accessibility to CH, is certainly rapid prototyping. The main goal of the research here illustrated is the application of rapid prototyping for the extension of accessibility of Cultural Heritage (CH) to blind and visually impaired people. This document reports an experiment that compared the effectiveness of different 3D models for the introduction of blind and visually impaired people to the tactile use of models of monuments. In addition, this study focuses on defining standards and guidelines regarding features of 3D models, e.g. print resolution, in order to obtain greater legibility of models at different scales by the blind or visually impaired people. This paper shows a part of a wider Interreg EU research project, named I-ACCESS, aimed to study accessibility problems and solutions for CH. The experiments conducted with the sample of disabled people, allowed to obtain results on the most suitable printing parameters to be used.</p

Designing Interactive and Immersive Multimodal Installations for People with Disability

We developed an end-to-end co-creative methodology for designing interactive and immersive multisensory virtual reality experiences with a particular focus on people with disability. Our method draws on what is called “design thinking” to provide a backbone to our approach. This embraces three stages, an empathic first stage, followed by an ideation phase, during which the thematic context is elaborated, and then an iterative exploration phase during which the initial concept is refined and the implementation is achieved. Furthermore, the “cognitive design” methodology developed by one of us led us to an approach incorporating all sensory modalities, not just the audio and visual modalities (that is, it includes odor, tactile, taste and proprioceptive stimuli), in order to deliver an experience that fully enhances the user’s sense of embodiment, and also led us to place the user’s experience at the heart of the installation. Users participate in the design process through co-design protocols. We showcase the application of this methodology in a detailed way for the construction of an interactive and immersive VR installation for people with disabilities

Touching Annotations: A Visual Metaphor for Navigation of Annotation in Digital Documents.

Direct touch manipulation interactions with technology are now commonplace and significant interest is building around their use in the culture and heritage domain. Such interactions can give people the opportunity to explore materials and artefacts in ways that would otherwise be unavailable. These are often heavily annotated and can be linked to a large array of related digital content, thus enriching the experience for the user. Research has addressed issues of how to present digital documents and their related annotations but at present it is unclear what the optimal interaction approach to navigating these annotations in a touch display context might be. In this paper we investigate the role of two alternative approaches to support the navigation of annotations in digitised documents in the context of a touch interface. Through a control study we demonstrate that, whilst the navigation paradigm displays a significant interaction with the type of annotations task performed, there is no discernible advantage of using a natural visual metaphor for annotation in this context. This suggests that design of digital document annotation navigation tools should account for the context and navigation tasks being considered

Designing an interactive exhibitor for assisting blind and visually impaired visitors in tactile exploration of original museum pieces

Blind and visually impaired visitors experience a lot of constraints when visiting museums exhibitions, giving the ocular centricity of these institutions, the lack of cognitive, physical and sensorial access to exhibits or replicas, increased by the inaccessibility to use the digital media technologies designed to provide different experiences, among other constraints. This paper aims to present the design and implementation of an exhibitor to communicate original museum samples to blind and visually impaired patrons, without the need to be replicated, that interactively "tell stories about their lives" whenever picked up. Tests performed with 13 partially sighted and blind participants at the main exhibition museum space, demonstrated very positive evaluations regarding pragmatic and hedonic qualities of the interaction, a positive capacity to mentally conceptualize the exhibits according to the audio descriptions, and how to enhance the experience of using more exhibitors like this one during a future visit to the museum.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio