Areti Galani

Shared visiting in EQUATOR city

In this paper we describe an infrastructure and prototype system for sharing of visiting experiences across multiple media. The prototype supports synchronous co-visiting by physical and digital visitors, with digital access via either the World Wide Web or 3-dimensional graphics.

‘I want to be provoked’: public involvement in the development of the Northumberland Rock Art on Mobile Phones project

Abstract Northumberland has a long history of public engagement surrounding its ancient rock-art. Recent advances in digital technologies have enabled archaeologists to enrich this engagement through the provision of open access to substantial rock-art datasets online. Building on these achievements, the Rock Art on Mobile Phones (RAMP) project allows Northumberlands countryside visitors to access in situ interpretation at three rock-art areas on their mobile phones. During the RAMP co-experience workshops it emerged that the key issues the public expected to be addressed by the mobile interpretation included locating rock-art, the desire for ambiguity and speculation about rock-art, and connecting to the landscape. The paper discusses, on the one hand, how these themes were incorporated into RAMPs conceptual design and, on the other hand, how RAMP themes compare with the Audience Development Plan produced by the archaeologists who created an online database. We consider the implications of these findings for the development of open-access online resources and in situ public interpretation.

Situating Cultural Technologies Outdoors: Empathy in the Design of Mobile Interpretation of Rock Art in Rural Britain

Mobile applications are presently at the forefront of interpreting outdoor historical and archaeological sites. This chapter discusses the methodological approach adopted in the Rock art mobile project (RAMP) which addresses the challenge of designing and delivering mobile interpretation at three Neolithic and Early Bronze Age rock art areas in Northumberland, UK. RAMP proposes a departure from the more traditional design approaches of delivering scientific content in the form of an archaeological mobile guide. It acknowledges that rock art interpretation requires a ‘design space’, which facilitates empathy between users and designers, and allows the existing archaeological content, the public’s fascination with the ‘cryptic’ meaning of the rock art sites and the technological, environmental and personal situation of the user to be explored and to inspire technological development.

Embedded Mixed Reality Environments

The deployment of mixed reality environments for use by members of the public poses very different challenges to those faced during focused lab studies and in defined engineering settings. This chapter discusses and presents examples from a set of case studies that have implemented and evaluated fully functioning mixed reality environments in three different organisational settings. Based on these case studies, common themes that are critical in the engineering of publicly deployed mixed reality are drawn out. Specifically, it is argued how the creation of a mixed reality interaction space depends on the technology as well as the environment, how asymmetric access provided to different sets of participants can be desirable and how social interaction reflects the particulars of the embedded technology, the length of deployment and the existing social organisation.