Empowering cultural heritage professionals with tools for authoring and deploying personalised visitor experiences

open2siThis paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a co-design process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation.openNot, Elena; Petrelli, DanielaNot, Elena; Petrelli, Daniel

The MUSETECH model : a comprehensive evaluation framework for museum technology

Digital technologies are being introduced in museums and other informal learning environments alongside more traditional interpretive and communication media. An increasing number of studies has proved the potential of digitally mediated cultural heritage experiences. However, there is still a lot of controversy as to the advantages and disadvantages of introducing the digital into museum settings, primarily related to the risks and investment in terms of time and human and financial resources required. This work introduces the MUSETECH model, a comprehensive framework for evaluating museum technology before and after its introduction into a museum setting. One of the unique features of our framework is to consider the evaluation of digital technologies from three different perspectives: the cultural heritage professional, cultural heritage institution, and museum visitor. The framework benefited from an extensive review of the current state of the art and from inputs from cultural heritage professionals, designers, and engineers. MUSETECH can be used as a tool for reflection before, during, and after introducing novel digital media resources. The model covers technologies as diverse as mobile museum guides, Augmented and Virtual Reality applications, hands-on museum interactives, edutainment applications, digitally mediated tangible and embodied experiences, or online approaches used for museum education and learning

Interacting with heritage: On the use and potential of IoT within the cultural heritage sector

This paper discusses the potential for the use of IoT technologies within cultural heritage, including the creation of new interactive experiences, visit personalisation, visitor data analysis, connected and distributed museum visits and the provision of pre- and post-visit experiences. We argue that cultural heritage offers a key opportunity for the development and deployment of new IoT systems, with potential benefits both for the cultural heritage domain and the IoT community. We present a number of areas of potential work for IoT researchers that are applicable to the heritage domain and to the broader IoT context, including challenges around poor connectivity, identifying and tracking visitors, and providing systems that are easily installed configured and maintained in environments with minimal infrastructure and poor technical support

Virtual Heritage

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments

Virtual Heritage

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments