Laia Pujol

A digital look at physical museum exhibits: Designing personalized stories with handheld Augmented Reality in museums

In this paper we present the design of handheld Augmented Reality (AR) experiences that are seamlessly incorporated into interactive museum narratives, specifically for the Acropolis Museum. The experiences start by forming a visitor profile that later dynamically adapts the narrative, including the AR activities, to the user`s behaviour. In this cohesive narrative context, the AR activities provide four ways to digitally look at the exhibits: virtual reconstruction of the original aspect; placement in the original location; visual highlighting of interesting details and annotations; and recreation of mythological appearances. The challenges of this design are presented, conluding with a discussion and lessons learned.

Evaluating presence in cultural heritage projects

This paper surveys current notions of social and cultural presence as they may help the evaluation of cultural heritage projects. We argue that cultural heritage requires specialized evaluation, as key issues both connect and separate the aims of presence researchers and cultural heritage experts. To support this argument, three case studies of virtual heritage evaluations are summarized, and recommendations made as to how experimental design and evaluation may be improved for future projects.

From personalization to adaptivity. Creating immersive visits through interactive digital storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work.