We outline our work in developing an Augmented Reality (AR) headset with low purchase and maintenance costs. Similar to Google Cardboard, the headset uses a smartphone to provide the compute power, connectivity and display. Unlike Google Cardboard, our headset does not block the user's view of the world and is therefore suitable for AR applications. The headset uses the Pepper's Ghost illusion to display images from the phone's screen via a transparent sheet located in front of the user's eyes. During a pilot study, we confirmed that the headset is effective in settings with low to medium levels of ambient illumination: in these conditions we demonstrated the effectiveness of using a mobile phone's standard screen brightness settings to present a range of photos, 3D images, short texts and shapes.
Museums are emotionally driven sites. People visit museums to feel and their emotions influence how the museum and its artefacts are perceived. Thus, evaluating emotional states are increasingly important for museums. However, evaluating visitors' experiences is increasingly challenging, especially with the introduction of new and emerging technology. Moreover, people's behaviour is not strictly objective and rational. While emotional states are subjective and hard to verbalize or observe, emoji are often used to express emotions on mobile and smartphone messaging applications. In this paper we investigate whether emoji can capture emotional states elicited by museum experiences, supporting traditional methods such as interviews. While other non-verbal self-report methods have been used to evaluate emotions, this is the first tool of this kind designed specifically to measure emotions elicited by museum experiences. We designed a set of 9 emoji illustrating a variety of emotional states beyond happyor-not. Then, we confirmed that participants understood our emoji's intended concept using a word association task. Finally, we used our 9 emoji to evaluate an interactive museum experience. We also run interviews and we investigated the correspondence between participants' comments and the emoji they chose. Through this study we gained a better understanding of how the emoji can be deployed to capture a range of visitors' emotional experiences. Our findings suggest that emoji can capture which emotional states participants felt beyond the happy-or-not dichotomy, but that they should be complemented with traditional methods such as interviews to understand why specific emotions were felt.
This paper explores the connection between memory study theories (antagonistic, cosmopolitan, and agonistic) and emotions in a dark heritage site. It does so by investigating Italian and Slovene visitors' emotional reactions to the permanent exhibition of the Kobarid Museum. The museum is located in a dark heritage site in Slovenia that was the epicenter of a series of bloody conflicts during the First World War. Relying on a cosmopolitan narrative, the museum promotes a clear antiwar message, aiming to elicit emotional responses such as empathy and compassion for the victims to connect with visitors. However, our analysis brings to light antagonistic emotions among Italian and Slovene visitors, raising important issues concerning the role of emotions and multiperspectivity in dark heritage sites. Hence, we discuss how these emotions could instead promote critical thinking, self-reflection, and crossnational dialogue.
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