Virtual Museums evaluation on portability, tangible visualisation and interaction techniques: Methodological guidelines with respect to portability, usability and integration

This deliverable represents the first iteration of an on-going set of activities aimed at identifying the best practices of virtual museums regarding portability, usability and integration. This defines a scaffold of criteria useful for the evaluation of portability (intended as multi­-fruition modes), tangible visualisation and interaction techniques of the best examples carried out under the V­-MusT.NET consortium.The final goal is to produce guidelines and indications on how to create a good portable application or an effective tangible interactive application, disconnected from the physical location.Therefore, a cross­-analysis on parameters such as “usability”, “portability” and“ integration” had been setup, taking advantages of recent experiences in the field of tangible and gesture­based interaction projects in immersive installations

UX Designer and Software Developer at the Mirror: Assessing Sensory Immersion and Emotional Involvement in Virtual Museums

Virtual Museums (VMs) and their audiences have always been studied as separated worlds. Recently the importance of cross-methodological studies has been accepted by the academic sector for their usefulness in the process of assessing the impact of such VMs. Hedonic aspects, such as emotions, senses, perception, and environmental atmosphere rather than technicalities, like usability and affordance, have indeed played a precise and crucial role in the meaning-making of the world around us. This contribution will highlight the need for a collaborative sharing of ideas among designers and developers, creators and technicians, in order to reach sensory immersion and emotional involvement in VMs that will translate into enhanced participation and the predisposition to assimilate and memorize cultural contents. It has been stated that “a virtual museum is a digital entity.” As such, it is inevitably based on technology, on its user interface (UI), on the visualization solutions it employs, and on its usability and ability to interact with the end user in order to transfer a certain message. VMs are designed to complement, enhance, or augment the ordinary museum experience through contextualization, narration, personalization, interactivity and richness of content. This contribution originates not only from the lessons learned in twenty years of research by CNR ITABC, but it also moves one step further in the direction of exchanged experiences and good practices between the humanistic and the technological sectors, therefore contributing to the promotion of lifelong learning in Virtual Museums

“Let’s do it together!” Indagare, progettare, sviluppare la web archaeology con l’aiuto di un questionario

In this paper the Author presents the results of a survey, which was created as a preliminary study that was part of the ARCA Project, a Ph.D. research project which started in November 2015. The purpose of the interview was to gather information about web sites related to archaeological projects and research, directly collecting feedback from users in order to analyze real world experiences and expectations. The questionnaire was prepared in collaboration with experts from other disciplines (psychologists, UX and UI experts, etc.), in order to promote an objective and scientifically valid approach, and obtain meaningful results. It is structured in 7 sections, for a total amount of 50 questions and practical experiences. One hundred and twenty people were invited to take part in this evaluation process; in a preliminary phase the interview was submitted to users coming exclusively from the Cultural Heritage Department of Padua University. Subsequently, it was opened to a wider audience from other universities and in other countries, to gather as much anonymous evidence as possible about functional feedback and user needs, also trying to map perception changes depending on origin, age, occupation and education. The collection and analysis of data allowed us to proceed further in the study and to develop software suitable for the presentation of different types of data from archaeological research. The final prototype will be evaluated through two case studies: the excavation of Nora and the Ca’Tron Project

Adaptivity of 3D web content in web-based virtual museums : a quality of service and quality of experience perspective

The 3D Web emerged as an agglomeration of technologies that brought the third dimension to the World Wide Web. Its forms spanned from being systems with limited 3D capabilities to complete and complex Web-Based Virtual Worlds. The advent of the 3D Web provided great opportunities to museums by giving them an innovative medium to disseminate collections' information and associated interpretations in the form of digital artefacts, and virtual reconstructions thus leading to a new revolutionary way in cultural heritage curation, preservation and dissemination thereby reaching a wider audience. This audience consumes 3D Web material on a myriad of devices (mobile devices, tablets and personal computers) and network regimes (WiFi, 4G, 3G, etc.). Choreographing and presenting 3D Web components across all these heterogeneous platforms and network regimes present a significant challenge yet to overcome. The challenge is to achieve a good user Quality of Experience (QoE) across all these platforms. This means that different levels of fidelity of media may be appropriate. Therefore, servers hosting those media types need to adapt to the capabilities of a wide range of networks and devices. To achieve this, the research contributes the design and implementation of Hannibal, an adaptive QoS & QoE-aware engine that allows Web-Based Virtual Museums to deliver the best possible user experience across those platforms. In order to ensure effective adaptivity of 3D content, this research furthers the understanding of the 3D web in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) through empirical investigations studying how 3D Web components perform and what are their bottlenecks and in terms of QoE studying the subjective perception of fidelity of 3D Digital Heritage artefacts. Results of these experiments lead to the design and implementation of Hannibal

VMUXE an approach to user experience evaluation for virtual museums

This paper presents a new approach for the evaluation of User Experience (UX) aspects applied to virtual museums (VM) - VMUXE. A wide percentage of projects and applications for VMs are often "born and buried" in digital labs, without having been experimented and monitored with people. These "prototypes" are the result of experts, technicians, curators, combined together to give birth for multidisciplinary and avant-garde outputs. Earlier attempts to evaluate VM installations failed due to the lack of strategy facing the multidimensional complexity in studying and comparing digital applications in different installations using different devices and metaphors offering different UXs. As a conclusion "communicating" culture through the aid of advanced technology was not a technological issue, but an epistemological one. Setting up a good process of evaluation and analysis is therefore important for establishing next generation virtual museums (NGVM) aiming to reach certain goals such as knowledge exchange, cognitive improvement and heritage communication