GameTale: Facilitating the Design of Gameful Museum Experiences

Digital technologies - games in particular - are offering museums new opportunities to engage the public with active and interactive experiences. Visitors are looking for experiences that are not only educative but also entertaining and more interactive than the traditional passive visit. While museums are pressured into designing experiences that are more interactive and digital, they are yet faithful to the traditional passive experience and are struggling to adapt to the new requirements. Thus, a game jam named GameTale was organized to facilitate museums with the design of new experiences that are emotionally and psychologically similar to games (i.e. gameful experiences). In order to achieve this purpose, participants should be given two main constraints: a short timeframe (i.e. 2 days) and a theme (i.e. develop the game around a specific artefact)

Development of an inexpensive Augmented Reality (AR) headset

We outline our work in developing an Augmented Reality (AR) headset with low purchase and maintenance costs. Similar to Google Cardboard, the headset uses a smartphone to provide the compute power, connectivity and display. Unlike Google Cardboard, our headset does not block the user's view of the world and is therefore suitable for AR applications. The headset uses the Pepper's Ghost illusion to display images from the phone's screen via a transparent sheet located in front of the user's eyes. During a pilot study, we confirmed that the headset is effective in settings with low to medium levels of ambient illumination: in these conditions we demonstrated the effectiveness of using a mobile phone's standard screen brightness settings to present a range of photos, 3D images, short texts and shapes

Emotions and critical thinking at a dark heritage site: investigating visitors’ reactions to a First World War museum in Slovenia

This paper explores the connection between memory study theories (antagonistic, cosmopolitan, and agonistic) and emotions in a dark heritage site. It does so by investigating Italian and Slovene visitors’ emotional reactions to the permanent exhibition of the Kobarid Museum. The museum is located in a dark heritage site in Slovenia that was the epicenter of a series of bloody conflicts during the First World War. Relying on a cosmopolitan narrative, the museum promotes a clear antiwar message, aiming to elicit emotional responses such as empathy and compassion for the victims to connect with visitors. However, our analysis brings to light antagonistic emotions among Italian and Slovene visitors, raising important issues concerning the role of emotions and multiperspectivity in dark heritage sites. Hence, we discuss how these emotions could instead promote critical thinking, self-reflection, and cross-national dialogue

Transfer of learning between screen-based and gallery-based content:an initial study

We ran a participatory design and evaluation of a paper prototype mobile application, called Digital Islam, to engage visitors and provide additional information in the British Museum’s Islamic Gallery. An evolutionary paper prototyping exercise involving 28 visitors aged 18-60 was run for 3 weeks. As visitors interacted with the paper prototype, we manipulated the prototype, observed the visitors as they interacted with it and took notes. We asked thevisitors to “think aloud” while interacting with the prototype. The prototype rapidly evolved as visitor feedback was fed back into the design. Visitors usually do not receive explicit training in the use of museum applications, instead relying on tacit training that may have positive or negative effects depending on what learning is transferred. Our study appeared to show negative transfer between visitors’ interactions with content in the gallery and content in theapplication. Visitors were asked to perform 3 tasks, finding (A) content in the gallery; (B) textual content on screen; and (C) video content on screen. Redesigns of the interface had little impact on users’ performance. The order of tasks and consequent transfer of learning between them seemed to be more important. Visitors found Task B particularly challenging when preceded by Task A. When we introduced Task C between A and B, performance on task B immediately improved: users found the on screen content more easily and faster and nolonger looked fruitlessly for it in the gallery. The study suggests that introducing additional content in mobile applications intended to improve the visitor experience can harm that experience without careful consideration of the tacit training and learning effects when combining content in the gallery and in the application

Unsettling Play: Perceptions of Agonistic Games

In this paper, we propose Agonistic Games (AGs) as a serious games subcategory that can stimulate critical reflection on topics of dark heritage through multiperspectivity and unsettling play. We first discuss the emerging topic of agonism in memory studies, and then how games can be used to support its objectives. We then discuss the development of 2 original AGs: Endless Blitz and Umschlagplatz '43. We explore whether these two AGs were perceived as capable of stimulating critical reflection by collecting data from visitors to the exhibition 'Krieg. Macht. Sinn' at the Ruhr Museum in Germany where the games were installed, and from participants in an online course describing the games. From analysing data collected, we outline four factors inhibiting the capacity of AGs to stimulate critical reflection (topic, context, design, and assumptions about games) and propose strategies for overcoming these inhibitors. Our findings are valuable to scholars, game researchers, and designers, strengthening the foundations for the design and development of future AGs

Towards Engaging Intangible Holographic Public Displays

Public displays are some of the most challenging interfaces to design because of two key characteristics. First, the experience should be engaging, to attract and maintain users’ attention. Second, the interaction with the display should be natural, meaning that users should be able to receive the desired output with little or no training. Holographic displays are increasingly popular in public spaces such as museums and concert halls but there is little published research on users’ experiences with such displays. Previous research has suggested both tangible and intangible inputs as engaging and natural options for holographic displays, but there is no conclusive evidence on their relative merits. Hence, we run a study to investigate the user experience with a holographic display comparing the level of engagement and feeling of natural experience in the interacting process. We used a mix of surveys, interviews, video recordings, and task-based metrics to measure users’ performance on a specific task, the perceived usability, and levels of engagement and satisfaction. Our findings suggest that a tangible input was reported as more natural than the intangible one, however, both tangible and intangible inputs were found to be equally engaging. The latter findings contribute to the efforts of designing intangible public holographic displays and other interactive systems that take into consideration health safety issues, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic era in which contamination can be established with tangible and physical interaction between users and public displays, yet without affecting the level of engagement compared to the tangible experience

Revealing the drivers of parasite community assembly: using avian haemosporidians to model global dynamics of parasite species turnover

Why do some regions share more or fewer species than others? Community assembly relies on the ability of individuals to disperse, colonize and thrive in new regions. Therefore, many distinct factors, such as geographic distance and environmental features, can determine the odds of a species colonizing a new environment. For parasites, host community composition (i.e. resources) also plays a key role in their ability to colonize a new environment as they rely on their hosts to complete their life cycle. Thus, variation in host community composition and environmental conditions should determine parasite turnover among regions. Here, we explored the global drivers of parasite turnover using avian malaria and malaria-like (haemosporidian) parasites. We compiled global databases on avian haemosporidian lineages distributions, environmental conditions, avian species distributions and functional traits, and ran generalized dissimilarity models to uncover the main drivers of parasite turnover. We demonstrated that haemosporidian parasite turnover is mainly driven by geographic distance followed by host functional traits, environmental conditions and host distributions. The main host functional traits associated with high parasite turnover were the predominance of resident (i.e. non-migratory) species and strong territoriality, while the most important climatic drivers of haemosporidian turnover were mean temperature and temperature seasonality. Overall, we established the importance of geographic distance as a key predictor of ecological dissimilarity and showed that host resources influence parasite turnover more strongly than environmental conditions. We also evidenced that parasite turnover is most pronounced among tropical and less interconnected regions (i.e. regions with mostly territorial and non-migratory hosts). Our findings provide a robust foundation for the prediction of avian pathogen spread and the emergence of infectious diseases.Fil: de Angeli Dutra, Daniela. University of Otago; Nueva ZelandaFil: Barros Pereira Pinheiro, Rafael. Universidade Estadual de Campinas; BrasilFil: Fecchio, Alan. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Centro de Investigación Esquel de Montaña y Estepa Patagónica. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia "San Juan Bosco". Centro de Investigación Esquel de Montaña y Estepa Patagónica; ArgentinaFil: Poulin, Robert. University of Otago; Nueva Zeland