Stella Sylaiou

Personalizing virtual and augmented reality for cultural heritage indoor and outdoor experiences

Most cultural heritage exhibitions, both indoor and outdoor, could benefit from context-aware and personalized museum guides. Although, technological advancements in digitization, digital storage, visualisation and interaction have evolved rapidly, the current generation of museum exhibition and mobile guides offer systems with restricted capabilities and content, for example user selected audio guides and interactive touch screen kiosks. This paper presents solutions for both museum exhibitions and mobile guides moving towards a unifying framework based on open standards. This can offer more customisable experiences attracting and engaging a broader spectrum of users. Our solution takes into account the diverse needs of visitors to heritage and mobile guide exhibitions allowing for multimedia representations of the same content but using diverse interfaces including a web, a map, a virtual reality and an augmented reality domain. Different case studies illustrate the majority of the capabilities of the multimodal interfaces used and also how personalisation and customisation can be performed in both kiosk and mobile guide exhibitions to meet user needs.

The Use of Serious Games in Museum Visits and Exhibitions: A Systematic Mapping Study

Serious Games (SGs) have been widely adopted in cultural settings and museums, especially the last five years. It is expected that SG can link directly the museum content with target user groups and can fulfill their educational needs. This paper aims to present a systematic mapping study on modern museum gaming technologies and applications. More specifically, focus is given on the use of Serious Games (SGs) by the visitors during exhibition navigation and exploration of museums cultural and educational content. Major analysis criteria and review findings include game goals, purpose of use, scope, user acceptance and educational effectiveness. A pool of 48 quality literature publications were set under examination. It was found that most solutions were game-based than play-based and that both genres had educational benefits on offer. Also, the frequency of relevant publications per year was increasing from year 2009 up to 2015. Regarding scope, studied applications were split almost equally among education, culture and arts, while the overwhelming majority were targeted to the general public and not teachers, students or parents specifically. Those findings are of particular importance for museum curators, digital cultural content creators, pedagogical engineers and museum interface designers.

Combinatory Usability Evaluation of an Educational Virtual Museum Interface

This paper presents the usability evaluation study that has been undertaken for the augmented representation of cultural objects (ARCO) system. The main purpose of this system is to integrate an enhanced educative and entertaining experience to virtual museum visitors. The aim of the current research is the evaluation of the interface of the system. Users as well as domain experts were recruited to investigate the most effective combination of user-based and expert-based evaluation, in order to elicit the most valuable results. Quantitative as well as qualitative approaches have also been employed, thus providing a framework for a holistic evaluation of the usability of an interface of such kind

Exploring the educational impact of diverse technologies in online virtual museums

This research explores the learning outcomes of online virtual museums employing diverse technologies such as images, videos, 3D reconstructions, etc. It presents the selection criteria (imageability, interactivity, navigability, personalisation, communication) of the five online virtual museums (VMs) involved in the analysis, each of which brings forward a prominent visualisation technology. Then, it describes the methodology of the evaluation process, in which a group of 164 (n = 164) participants, after exploration of the virtual museum websites, answered a self-administered questionnaire including 12 questions based on the concept of generic learning outcomes: a) knowledge and understanding; b) skills; c) change in attitude and values; d) enjoyment, inspiration and creativity; e) action, behaviour and progression. The results of a statistical analysis investigating the educational impact of each VM are analysed. The potential educational advantage of incorporating complex 3D reconstructions in a VM is questioned. A new methodology for analysing VMs is required. This paper contributes to the understanding of the educational impact of VMs in relation to their underlying technology and human computer interaction (HCI) features. Therefore, conclusions have a wider impact and can be generalised to be relevant even after design changes of the VMs selected for the evaluation.