A mixed reality neighborhood tour: understanding visitor experience and perceptions

Museums are increasingly turning to technology to improve their offerings. This presents an opportunity to surrounding neighborhoods to take advantage of the museum in order to connect with visitors and offer them a glimpse into their community. The work presented in this article contributes to advancing the state of the art in designing Mixed Reality (MR) entertainment experiences by presenting and discussing Yasmine’s Adventures (YA), a mobile application aiming to extend the museum visitor’s experience into the surrounding neighborhood. YA demonstrates the potential of MR in engaging visitors to explore neglected urban areas. This is achieved by incorporating the opinions of community members, and other contextual information, into a fictional story telling journey, delivered through a MR entertainment experience distributed in real space. Consequently, users are provided with opportunity to connect with enriched portraits of these spaces. Results from a quantitative and qualitative evaluation showed that participants’ perception of the neighborhood was positively affected by the experience, which fostered curiosity and willingness to explore the neighborhood both at the spatial and social levels. By taking the tour, participants increased their interest in interacting with locals and fostered greater knowledge of the area, which they were willing to share after experiencing it.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Aqua : Leveraging Citizen Science to Enhance Whale-Watching Activities and Promote Marine-Biodiversity Awareness

Life-supporting ecosystems are facing impending destruction. The human-computer interaction (HCI) community must rethink how to design technological interventions that reconcile concepts and theories for ecological computing. Proponents of sustainable HCI have pushed for tools and systems that aim to decenter the human in a shift toward post human design-a theoretical approach that challenges the assumption that only humans are stakeholders of technology as it increasingly shapes the future. Building on the iconic value of whales and the economic impact of whale watching as a form of ecotourism, we developed Aqua, a digital tool that leverages the potential of citizen science to engage tourists in marine-biodiversity awareness and conservation. This manuscript is advancing the field of sustainable HCI and tourism applications in two ways: first, we deliver an artefact contribution by designing and implementing a digital tool to enhance whale-watching activities. Second, we offer an empirical research contribution through observation and data gathering while comparing participants’ experiences of a whale-watching trip with and without the digital tool. Finally, preliminary insights are provided to inform the design of future digital tools aimed at promoting environmental conservation and citizen-science approaches among tourists. This work presents progression in understanding and informs the design of digital tools to engage tourists in novel and sustainable experiences.This work was supported by INTERTAGUA-MAC2/1.1a/385 and LARSyS-UIDB/50009/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evaluation of yasmine’s adventures: exploring the socio-cultural potential of location aware multimedia stories

This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware multi‐ media story designed as a location based service for a museum. Yasmine’s Adventures follows a young local girl (Yasmine) through a series of short animated adventures, tailored specifically to engage visitors in exploring the rela‐ tively neglected streets of the area in which the museum is situated. Yasmine’s perceptions of the landmarks, identified by community members themselves, reflect the real concerns of the community. Results from the evaluation of the user’s experience suggest location connection and perception changes when loca‐ tive media narratives include learning, understanding and discovery elements.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Interactive Digital Storytelling and Hybrid Art Approaches

This volume collects documentation of the 2017 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling Art Exhibition and new scholarly texts from the artists involved. The work traces themes of Time & Tempo across Digital Poetics and Literature, Digital Heritage, and Urban Space and Politics

Yasmine’s adventures: an interactive urban exploring the sociocultural potential of digital entertainment

Urban computing systems impact quality of life in densely populated areas. With the widespread availability of wireless networks and portable devices, ur ban areas are fast becoming a hybrid of the physical environment and the digital datasphere. This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware story telling platform that leverages on urban computing strategies to create an inter active walk through the Mehringplatz area, surrounding the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Yasmine’s Adventures (YA) is a mobile application that delivers a se quence of animations clips tailored specifically to the Mehringplatz neighbour hood. The story follows an adventurous local girl as she walks home alone, vis iting local landmarks. Yasmine’s perceptions of the landmarks, identified by community members in an earlier workshop, reflect the real concerns of the community. This interactive experience was created to engage visitors of the Jewish Museum to explore the relatively neglected streets of the area in which the museum is situated.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Step by Step: Evaluating Navigation Styles in Mixed Reality Entertainment Experience

The availability of depth sensing technology in smartphones and tablets adds spatial awareness as an interaction modality to mobile entertainment experiences and showcases the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) for creating immersive and engaging experiences in real world contexts. However, the lack of design knowledge about interactions within MR represents a barrier to creating effective entertainment experiences. Faced with this challenge, we contribute a study of three navigation styles (NS) for MR experiences shown on a handheld device. The navigation styles range from fully virtual, through a mixed style that involves both on-screen and in-world activity, to fully real navigation. Our findings suggest that when designing an MR experience, the navigation style deployed should reflect the context, content and required interactions. For our MR experience, ???The Old Pharmacy???, with its specific content, context and required interactions, results show that navigation styles relying on in-world activity leads to higher levels of Presence, Immersion and Flow

Yasmine’s Adventures: An Interactive Urban Experience Exploring the Sociocultural Potential of Digital Entertainment

Part 1: Full papersInternational audienceUrban computing systems impact quality of life in densely populated areas. With the widespread availability of wireless networks and portable devices, urban areas are fast becoming a hybrid of the physical environment and the digital datasphere. This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware storytelling platform that leverages on urban computing strategies to create an interactive walk through the Mehringplatz area, surrounding the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Yasmine’s Adventures (YA) is a mobile application that delivers a sequence of animations clips tailored specifically to the Mehringplatz neighbourhood. The story follows an adventurous local girl as she walks home alone, visiting local landmarks. Yasmine’s perceptions of the landmarks, identified by community members in an earlier workshop, reflect the real concerns of the community. This interactive experience was created to engage visitors of the Jewish Museum to explore the relatively neglected streets of the area in which the museum is situated

The StoryPlaces Platform: Building a Web-Based Locative Hypertext System

Locative narrative systems have been a popular area of research for nearly two decades, but they have tended to be bespoke systems, developed for particular deployments, or to demonstrate novel technologies. This has inevitably meant that they are short-lived, the narratives have been constructed by the creators, or co-creators, of the system, and that the barrier to creating locative experiences has remained high due to a lack of common tools. We set out to create a re-usable platform that would be based on the commonalities of these historic systems, with a strong focus on hypertext structure, and designed to enable a range of locative based narratives to be created, deployed, and experienced in-the-wild. The result is StoryPlaces, an open source locative hypertext platform and authoring tool designed around a generic sculptural hypertext engine and built with established Web infrastructure and standards. As well as providing an open platform for future development, StoryPlaces also offers novelty in its management of location within a hypertext, including the separation of location and nodes, separation of descriptions from locations, and the separation of content from pages, as well as being designed to have run-time caching and disconnection resilience. It also advances the state of the art in sculptural hypertext systems delivery through conditional functions, as well as nested, geographic and temporal conditions. The StoryPlaces platform has been used for the public deployment of over twenty locative narratives, and demonstrates the effectiveness of a general sculptural hypertext engine for delivering complex locative narrative experiences. In this paper we describe the process of creation of the platform and our insights on the design and construction of locative hypertext platforms

Difficult Play: Developing Games with/in Complex Political Narratives, Threatened Environments and Challenging Histories

Abstract of paper 0789 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019