Mediating distance: new interfaces and interaction design techniques to follow and take part in remote museum visits

Abstract

Purpose This paper presents a study of a system that allows remote and onsite visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. The remote visitors are older adults at a care home and their relatives and/or friends who are at the museum. The museum visits are interactive. Meaningful stories accompany the museum exhibits, and there’s an audio channel between onsite and remote visitors. The aim of the study is to determine whether the remote visitors, i.e. older adults are able to use such technology and to study the mediated sense of spatial presence, social closeness, engagement and enjoyment in the visit. This study discusses the relationship between these aspects and factors leading to a better remote experience for older adults. Design/methodology/approach This study has 14 onsite and 12 remote older adult participants. Standardized questionnaires measured the mediated sense of spatial presence, the experienced social closeness and the level of participants' engagement and enjoyment in the visit of the older adult participants and traced onsite visitors in their position during the visit. The audio logs were subjected to thematic content analysis. Findings The results show that older adults enjoy and engage in remote visits, and that there is a positive correlation between enjoyment, engagement and social closeness. The findings argue that both the audio channel and the interactive story are important for creating an affective virtual experience: the audio channel increases the sense of closeness, whereas the interactive story makes the visit more engaging, providing structure, direction and purpose to the visit. Originality/value This work advances the state of art in the domain of technologies for older adults and addresses the needs of this population to stay in contact with both people and places.

Designing a system to chart the development of the UK museum sector: an iterative approach

“…There has been much work on digitizing and publishing data about cultural heritage collections, for example through an integrative semantic portal (Hyvönen et al, 2005), through translation of cultural heritage metadata into linked open data (Haslhofer et al, 2011;De Boer et al, 2012;Matsumura et al, 2012;Knoblock et al, 2017) and through the development of specialist ontologies and knowledge bases (Schmitz and Black, 2008;Brownlow et al, 2015;Carriero et al, 2019). Other works on digitizing museum-related information include sharing of museum visit experiences via web and smartphone apps, digital bookmarking, or real-time video (Kostoska et al, 2013;Pisoni et al 2020), digitization of historical archives (Colla et al, 2021), and application of machine-learning approaches to automatically generate cultural heritage content or metadata utilising public resources such as Wikipedia and Wikidata (De Benedictis et al, 2021;Colla et al, 2021). In contrast to such works, the MM project aims to support experts' research into the history, status and development of a whole museum sector.…”

“…Several works (e.g. Petrelli and Not, 2005;Schmitz and Black, 2008;Pettrelli and Whittaker, 2010;Pisoni, 2020) stress the importance of involving end-users from the outset in the design of heritage-related applications, e.g. through interviews, questionnaires, iterative prototyping and trialling, and content/statistical analysis of participants' responses.…”

Mixed Cultural Visits or What COVID-19 Taught Us

“…The potential of mixed visits to support the physicality of the cultural experience is significant because mixed visits can help people who cannot physically participate to connect with a cultural space. For example, Pisoni [70] used a system that allowed older people in a nursing home to connect with their friends and family in the museum and to experience the museum space. In addition, De Carolis et al [71] investigated how social robots could be used in tourism and cultural experiences.…”

Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence for Designing Accessible Cultural Heritage

“…Narratives are responsible for mental immersion through which users can be engaged and involved in the experience, increasing their sense of mediated presence as well. Visitors preferences have been studied [104][105][106], and more engaging approaches have been proposed for stimulating the visitor interests by using presentations such as film or drama [45,107]. The drama was adapting to the visitors so that different available independent drama segments were played to be group based on characteristics of the group of visitors, the specific context of the visit, and implicit input from the visitors themselves.…”