PerTe

In the past museums have been slow in fully utilising new technologies, but in the last decade this situation has changed dramatically. The need for more support to visitors and more collaboration between experts and between museums has led to the exploration of how new technologies can extend the traditional museum. In this paper a new concept of such an extended museum is presented, with particular attention to gathering, organization and consumption of knowledge.

When we go to the museum, we see many interesting objects that have fascinating stories related to them. However, visitors do not often share these experiences with people that have not visited the exhibition. Sharing is beneficial both because it can create interest and attract people to the museum, and because it can help people who cannot attend the visit (for example, is physically unable to do so) to still enjoy it. We were interested to understand the extent and motivation behind sharing (or not sharing) and test how to encourage visitors to do so. We conducted and are conducting various surveys and trials, for which we report the preliminary results in this paper. Initial findings show that i) people today rarely share their visits for lack of content to complement their storytelling, and ii) by providing visitors with a simple and easy-to-create virtual photobook with their dearest memories from the visit we can significantly enhance this sharing.

The paper describes the design process and a preliminary study of a novel interface (digital booklet) for facilitating sharing of museums experiences and specifically for helping older adults to participate remotely to museum visits done by friends or relatives. We design in particular for people that for cognitive, physical, or logistic limitations are not able to visit museums, or for which it is very challenging to do so. We performed a user study with a total of 30 older adult participants, 21 in care home (10 of which with significant cognitive decline), and 9 participants in daily center (all of them without degenerative health problems). Our main hypothesis was that given the right set of tools for supporting the visitor during and after the visit we could increase sharing and reach wider audiences, including older and cognitively impaired adults. We compared the performance between healthy and cognitively impaired older adults on four tasks: open the booklet, browse the booklet, zoom in/out a picture, close the picture after being zoomed in/out. Our results showed that the booklet metaphor was well accepted by almost all the participants and they were able to consume and enjoy the content; the more complex and less intuitive functions like zooming and closing a picture were found to be more difficult for the the cognitively impaired group of participants. Our results can contribute the ongoing research in the field of interfaces for older adults and the challenge of intergenerational communication.

Most museums try to find with different ways to prolong the museum experience outside of the museum environment and facilitate its sharing after the visit. The main reason is two-fold: it can create interest and attract people to the museum, and it can help people who for various cognitive or physical limitations cannot attend the visit, to still enjoy it. We conducted couple of surveys and we designed a possible platform for facilitating sharing, for which we report the preliminary results in this paper. Our findings show that i) although visitors claim that they would like to share their visit, the number of the actual sharing visitors is significantly low, ii) most of the visitors use only verbal narrations in order to share their experience with friends and families, and iii) visitors do not share emotions “virtually” (e.g., facebook or twitter) during the visit. Guided by these results we developed a potential solution through which sharing can be facilitated. It includes various ways to bookmark or “save” and share artifacts during the visit, catering different types of visitors. It also includes a way for people at home to consume the shared content.

The goal of this paper is to understand if older adults can participate in remote museum visits with virtual environments, and which design factors would be crucial for remote participation system success. We report on a study with 30 older adult participants, identifying strong and weak points of different designs for remote participation and identifying future design directions. Our results illustrate that different designs can change communication dynamics, exploration and navi- gation patterns, and we describe the design features that led to this. An interaction-free design was found to be the easiest to use, while virtual environments are perceived as aesthetically appealing. Implications for developers are discussed.