Museums and the Web 2007, USA
ARCHIE is uitgenodigd voor Museums and the Web 2007, 'the international conference for culture and heritage on-line'. Deze jaarlijkse conferentie is 'devoted to exploring the on-line presentation of cultural and heritage content across institutions and around the world'. De conferentie loopt van 11 tot 14 april 2007 in San Francisco, California (USA). Op 12 april presenteren we onze paper tijdens de 'Alternative Realities' sessie.
H. VAN LOON e.a., Supporting social interaction: a collaborative trading game on PDA.
Abstract
ARCHIE is a research project in which the educational staff of the Gallo-Roman Museum collaborates with the Human-Computer Interaction research group of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) in the context of expansion of the museum. Starting point of this interdisciplinary collaboration is our strong belief that handheld guides are a promising medium to enhance the visitor’s learning experience in a museum. Recently, mobile devices are becoming a common aid to support a museum visit, though the first PDA-based applications also revealed some important shortcomings: the device demands lots of attention, tends to displace the surrounding objects and generates the unintended side effect that it’s a quite individual, isolated experience. However, many studies have pointed out that interactions with the exhibit, as well as communication and social interaction between visitors are key points of a successful learning environment. Designing for interaction asks for a mental switch. Main reason why current solutions fail is that the hardware and content are designed and structured for retrieval by one person rather than by multiple persons.
We want to deal with the above mentioned unintended side effects and explore the possibilities an interactive, mobile and networked museum guide can offer to (groups of) visitors: a greater versatility for visitors to tailor information to their needs and interests (personalization), to discover the exhibits at their own pace (localization) and to communicate and interact with family or group members (social interaction). Three services make up the core of the system we are developing: a group communication facility, automatic personalization and WiFi-based localization. Collaborative context-aware applications can be built using these services of the framework. A collaborative trading game for (school) groups of children (aged 10-14 years) is the first application we build using these services to verify the usefulness of the services and test whether it supports our goals.
The trading game concerns the introduction of social differentiation in West European society (round 825 BC). There are 4 players in the game who participate in the collaborative application through a PDA and who have different roles, property, exchangeable goods and goals. We designed the museum game in this way that every player is dependent on the concrete actions of other players; only through social interaction and cooperation can they come to a good end. Every player has his own character (avatar) and all participants can communicate directly to each other using their PDAs and Voice-over-IP technology. They can use this to negotiate on trade proposals and to help each other solving questions. Indirect communication between participants is carried out by the trade actions, which are necessary to accomplish the game.
In this paper we present the ARCHIE project, its objectives and framework overview, make clear why we want to stress on social interaction and give some important design sensitivities that should be taken into account while designing for interaction. We present a first application, a collaborative trading game for (school)groups of children, from conceptual stage towards final implementation and conclude with user test results.
NODEM 2006, Noorwegen
ARCHIE was aanwezig met een presentatie en een demonstratie op de NODEM 2006 - Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums - conferentie Noorwegen. Deze conferentie liep van 7 tot 9 december en werd georganiseerd door het Departement Media en Communicatie van de Universiteit van Oslo en het V4M Interactive Institute (te Stockholm, Zweden).
H. Van Loon e.a., Designing for interaction: socially-aware museum handheld guides.
Abstract
We present ARCHIE, an interdisciplinary research project of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) and the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren (Province of Limburg) which aims to discover how a handheld guide can be used to enhance the museum learning experience. Because we stress on the important role of social interaction as a prerequisite for intellectual, social, personal and cultural development, one of the main objectives of the ARCHIE project is to encourage and stimulate interaction with the museum, the PDA and fellow visitors. Designing for interaction however asks for a mental switch. At this point, we developed a first application: a collaborative trading game.
VAST 2006, Cyprus
ARCHIE was aanwezig op VAST, International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, dat doorging van 30 oktober tot 4 november te Nicosia, Cyprus. Thema van de conferentie was ‘The e-volution of Information Technology in Cultural Heritage. Where Hi-Tech Touches the Past: Risks and Challenges for the 21st Century’.
K. Luyten e.a., ARCHIE: Disclosing a Museum by a Socially-aware Mobile Guide. In: Proc. of CIPA-VAST-EG 2006, Oct. 2006.
Abstract
We present ARCHIE, a research project which aims to discover how handheld guides can be used as powerful instruments to enhance the visitor’s learning experience. Although mobile devices are becoming a common aid to support a museum visit, they often lead to an individualized experience. However, most people do not visit a museum alone, and recent research has pointed out that social interaction is a prerequisite for an intensified and improved learning process. To accommodate the shortcomings in many of the current solutions, we are designing a platform that enables us to create a socially-aware handheld guide that stimulates interaction between group members. They can communicate with each other either directly (by voice) or indirectly (by collaborative games) by means of their mobile guides. Besides the aforementioned communication possibilities, handheld guides can also provide a way to present personalized content. By using a personal profile, it is possible to adapt the interface and tailor the information to the needs and interests of every visitor.
The combination of personalized content and interfaces, communication channels between visitors in the same group and support for localization might lead to an innovative mobile guide that integrates with the museum as well as with other visitors. Our platform enables social, and, in many cases, playful interactions with other visitors in the same group. At the same time the context-awareness (proximity and personalization) increases the involvement of the visitor with the content presented in the museum.
