Alan J. Wecker

The Influence of a Location-Aware Mobile Guide on Museum Visitors' Behavior

Many museums offer their visitors the use of a mobile guide to enhance their visit experience. Novel mobile guides have the potential to provide personalized, context-aware, rich content to museum visitors. However, they might also affect the way visitors behave and interact. While many studies have examined novel features that these guides can provide to enhance the visit experience, few have looked into the impact that a mobile guide might have on the actual behavior of the visitors. We describe a field study conducted with 403 actual museum visitors, over a period of 10 months comparing behaviors of visitors who used a mobile multimedia location-aware guide during their visit and that of visitors who did not use any electronic aid. Results indicate that visitors’ behavior was altered considerably when using a mobile guide. Visitors using a mobile guide visited the museum longer and were attracted to and spent more time at exhibits where they could get information from the guide. In addition, we provide empirical evidence of the decoupling effect that a mobile guide has on pairs of visitors. Using a mobile guide caused visitors to reduce proximity and to interact less with their fellow group members. Finally, we discuss what may be done to reduce this negative social effect.

An integrative framework for extending the boundaries of the museum visit experience: linking the pre, during and post visit phases

The Cultural Heritage experience at the museum begins before the actual on-site visit and continues with memories and reflections after the visit. In considering the potential of novel information and communication technology to enhance the entire visit experience, one scenario envisioned is extending the on-site visit boundaries, to help the visitors access information concerning exhibits that are of primary interest to them during pre-visit planning, provide relevant information to the visitors during the visit, and follow up with post visit memories and reflections. All this can be done by using today’s state of the art mobile and web-based applications, as well as any new foreseeable emerging technology. So far, research on applying novel information and communication technology in the cultural heritage domain has focused primarily on exploring specific aspects of the technology and its capability for supporting the individual visitor mainly during the physical, on-site, visit (and in some cases in additional specific phases such as prior or after the visit). This paper suggests a novel, integrative framework for supporting the pre, during and post visit phases in a personalized manner. It is based on a set of standard, common models: a visitor model, a site model and a visit model, all enable a large variety of services to store, update and reuse data during the three phases of the visit. Our contribution is presenting a framework architecture with its underlying infrastructure, and showing in a case study how this framework supports the various visit phases in an actual museum. The suggested framework is generic; it is not limited to a specific setting or scenario and it is open and can be easily adopted and used by practitioners and researchers to be implemented in different sites and settings. As such, it provides a further step in extending the cultural heritage experience beyond the on-site visit and towards linking individual episodes into complete, memorable personal experiences.

Pathlight: supporting navigation of small groups in the museum context

In this paper we describe the in-progress work of the Pathlight navigation system for groups and individuals. Pathlight provides indoor navigation support in the museum using a handheld projector. We describe some of the advantages the system provides, look at some background, briefly describe some system features, and posit some open questions for further investigation.

Shared mobile displays: an exploratory study of their use in a museum setting

We conducted an exploratory study that examines the use of shared mobile displays such as mobile projectors and tablets to support group activities. We compare how a small group of visitors use either a shared display or personal individual devices in a museum visit context, in both a navigation task and a media viewing task. Group proximity, decision making, leadership patterns, and interaction between group members as well as attitudes are analyzed. We report on various usage patterns observed with group use of shared displays and discuss user preferences in comparison with the non-shared handheld alternative. Results show how mobile shared displays can support and enhance the group experience, by providing a shared mobile environment. Mobile shared displays increase group cohesiveness as was shown by increased proximity and amount of discussion by participants. Users perceive the use of shared displays as both useful and enjoyable, with the caveat that many users still want to retain individual control. We discuss this trade-off between groupness and individual control, as well as provide an analysis of the relative advantages of each shared display option.

Semantize: visualizing the sentiment of individual document

A plethora of tools exist for extracting and visualizing key sentiment information from a corpus of text documents. Often, however, there is a need for quickly assessing the sentiment and feelings that arise from an individual document. We describe an interactive tool that visualizes the sentiment of a specific document such as an online opinion, blog, or transcript, by visually highlighting the sentiment features while leaving the document text intact.

Where To Go And How To Get There: Guidelines For Indoor Landmark-Based Navigation In A Museum Context

Technology-supported indoor navigation is not easy; there are many technological challenges as well as UI challenges that need to be addressed. A set of user interface guidelines for designing a navigation system in a CH setting has been developed based on our experience and current best practices. In this paper, we describe an implementation of our guidelines in an indoor navigation system that supports visitors in a cultural Heritage (CH) setting. The system was developed to provide a user-friendly tool for route navigation, based on photo landmarks. Maps, landmarks and contextual information are used in order to navigate. In addition the system supports visitors who meander off the path while navigating

How scales influence user rating behaviour in recommender systems

ABSTRACT Many websites allow users to rate items and share their ratings with others, for social or personalisation purposes. In recommender systems in particular, personalised suggestions are generated by predicting ratings for items that users are unaware of, based on the ratings users provided for other items. Explicit user ratings are collected by means of graphical widgets referred to as ‘rating scales’. Each system or website normally uses a specific rating scale, in many cases differing from scales used by other systems in their granularity, visual metaphor, numbering or availability of a neutral position. While many works in the field of survey design reported on the effects of rating scales on user ratings, these, however, are normally regarded as neutral tools when it comes to recommender systems. In this paper, we challenge this view and provide new empirical information about the impact of rating scales on user ratings, presenting the results of three new studies carried out in different domains. Based on these results, we demonstrate that a static mathematical mapping is not the best method to compare ratings coming from scales with different features, and suggest when it is possible to use linear functions instead.

Dynamic personalization based on mobile behavior: from personality to personalization: a blueprint

Systems often try to give advice to users. Personalization and the use of personality in the use of recommendation systems is a very topical. Examining the Cultural Heritage Domain, we propose a framework how we can monitor visitor behavior on the go, something that is mildly volatile, to determine personality traits, something that is more stable. This knowledge can be then used along with context to give tailored advice. Methods of monitoring visitor behavior, converting that to traits and that to personality types are described. Different dimensions of how to give tailored advice based on personality are described.

Personalized access to cultural heritage (PATCH2014): the future of experiencing cultural heritage

Since 2007, the PATCH workshop series have been gathering successfully researchers and professionals from various countries and institutions to discuss the topics of digital access to cultural heritage and specifically the personalization aspects in this process. Due to this rich history, the reach of the PATCH workshop in various research communities is extensive.

Visualizing sentiment: do you see what i mean?

Many tools exist for extracting and visualizing key information from a corpus of text documents. However often, one would like to assess the sentiment and feelings that arise from a single document. This paper describes an interactive service that visualizes the sentiment of a specific document. The service enables the user to visualize the sentimental polarity of each paragraph to get a detailed impression; to quickly detect the polarity of emotional words; to identify subjective sentences within the text, and the grade level of language used in each sentence. Participants in an initial qualitative evaluation found the service fast and useful.