Encouraging persons to visit cultural sites through mini-games

Gamification has been recently proposed as a technique to improve user engagement in different activities, including visits to cultural sites and cultural tourism in general. We present the design, development and initial validation of the NEPTIS Poleis system, which consists of a mobile application and a Web interface for curators, allowing the definition, and subsequent fruition by users, of different minigames suitable for open-air assets

The imperial war museum’s social interpretation project

This report represents the output from research undertaken by University of Salford and MTM London as part of the joint Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, operated by Nesta, Arts Council England and the AHRC. University of Salford and MTM London received funding from the programme to act as researchers on the Social Interpretation (SI) project, which was led by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and their technical partners, The Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London, Knowledge Integration, and Gooii. The project was carried out between October 2011 and October 2012

Learning computing heritage through gaming – whilst teaching digital development through history

This paper analyses the potential of computer games and interactive projects within the learning programmes for cultural heritage institutions through our experiences working in partnership between higher education and a museum. Gamification is cited as a key disruptive technology for the business and enterprise community, and developments in games technology are also driving the expansion of digital media into all different screen spaces, and various platforms. Our research aims to take these as beneficial indicators for pedagogic development, using gaming to support knowledge transfer related to a museum setting, and using the museum as a key scenario for our students to support the practice of game development. Thus gamification is applied as both a topic and a methodology for educational purposes

Development of a Mobile Website for the Worcester Art Museum

The Worcester Art Museum is looking to deploy interpretive technologies within galleries to increase visitor engagement throughout the museum. Through interviewing, brainstorming, and collaboration with museum professionals, we decided the best course of action for this project was to implement a WAM Mobile Website with top features being an exhibit viewer, audio tours, and an interactive map. Implementation involved an iterative design process, learning three web development languages, and refinements to the website design. The project culminated in the mobile website, a promotional video, recommendations, and a set of guides to sustain the mobile website

Deepening visitor engagement with museum exhibits through hand-crafted visual markers

Visual markers, in particular QR codes, have become widely adopted in museums to enable low cost interactive applications. However, visitors often do not engage with them. In this paper we explore the application of visual makers that can be designed to be meaningful and that can be created by visitors themselves. We study both the use of these markers as labels for portraits that link to audio recordings and as a mechanism for visitors to contribute their own reflections to the exhibition by drawing a marker and linking an audio comment. Our findings show visitors appreciated the use of the aesthetic markers and engaged with them at three levels – physical placement, aesthetic content and digital content. We suggest that these different levels need to be considered in the design of future visiting systems, which make use of such markers, to ensure they are mutually supporting in shaping the experience

Mobile technology to support coherent story telling across freely explored outdoor artworks

Museum professionals create exhibitions that tell stories about museum objects. The exhibits are usually arranged to reveal the relationships between them and to highlight the story being told. But sometimes objects are in fixed places and cannot be re-positioned. This paper presents a solution to the problem of how to tell conceptually coherent stories across a set of fixed artworks within the grounds of a museum and to reveal relationships between them. A study was conducted in which QR codes were used to provide access, through mobile devices, to online information about artworks. A notion of conceptual coherence and coverage of artworks was used to construct online story trails linking artworks to each other based on overlap of key story features such as setting, people and themes. Visitors were free at all times to follow their own path through the museum grounds and choose which objects they wanted to stop and engage with. The QR code trail was evaluated on an outdoor art trail at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Analytics of page access were used to identify how often visitors scanned QR codes and to what extent, once they had visited the online information about an artwork, they were likely to follow the story links

Fun-Game Application to create Interactive and Attracting Museum using Mobile Phone and QR Code Tags

Museum have a very important role to give understanding and knowledge of human historical and civilazation. On museum people can learn the development of human civilization, art, history, and technology. Unfortunately museums are often still perceived as uninteresting and boring place to go. This research try to developt an interactive information and fun-game on the museum using mobile phone application and QR code technology. The fun-game will delivered to visitor by give them a riddle question and also using silhoutte guess game about the artefact in the museum. The visitor will answer the question by scan the QR code tags that attach on the museum artefact

A design space for social object labels in museums

Taking a problematic user experience with ubiquitous annotation as its point of departure, this thesis defines and explores the design space for Social Object Labels (SOLs), small interactive displays aiming to support users' in-situ engagement with digital annotations of physical objects and places by providing up-to-date information before, during and after interaction. While the concept of ubiquitous annotation has potential applications in a wide range of domains, the research focuses in particular on SOLs in a museum context, where they can support the institution's educational goals by engaging visitors in the interpretation of exhibits and providing a platform for public discourse to complement official interpretations provided on traditional object labels. The thesis defines and structures the design space for SOLs, investigates how they can support social interpretation in museums and develops empirically validated design recommendations. Reflecting the developmental character of the research, it employs Design Research as a methodological framework, which involves the iterative development and evaluation of design artefacts together with users and other stakeholders. The research identifies the particular characteristics of SOLs and structures their design space into ten high-level aspects, synthesised from taxonomies and heuristics for similar display concepts and complemented with aspects emerging from the iterative design and evaluation of prototypes. It presents findings from a survey exploring visitors' mental models, preferences and expectations of commenting in museums and translates them into requirements for SOLs. It reports on scenario-based design activities, expert interviews with museum professionals, formative user studies and co-design sessions, and two empirical evaluations of SOL prototypes in a gallery environment. Pulling together findings from these research activities it then formulates design recommendations for SOLs and supports them with related evidence and implementation examples. The main contributions are (i) to delineate and structure the design space for SOLs, which helps to ground SOLs in the literature and understand them as a distinct display concept with its own characteristics; (ii) to explore, for the first time, a visitor perspective on commenting in museums, which can inform research, development and policies on user-generated content in museums and the wider cultural heritage sector; (iii) to develop empirically validated design recommendations, which can inform future research and development into SOLs and related display concept. The thesis concludes by summarising findings in relation to its stated research questions, restating its contributions from ubiquitous computing, domain and methodology perspectives, and discussing open issues and future work

Implementing QR Code to Create Indonesia Museum Interactive Information Application

The tourism sector is one of the revenue resources that can be explored without any depletion. The tourism sector can also absorb a lot of manpower. One of the tourism potential is the historical heritage such as the ancient culture, religious relics, and the historical war. Currently, there is still lacking exploration from museum as one of tourism potential especially in Indonesia. People still think museum as a gloomy, historical, and boring place. In this research, we try to build a prototype of interactive museum information that made using mobile device application and QR code. The QR code tag will be place on museum artefact and rooms in the museum to give interaction information to the museum visitor. By scan the QR code tag, museum visitor will provided with more information about the artefact, rooms, etc. The museum information will provided using text, image, sound, and video