meSch – Tools for Interactive Exhibitions

Abstract

Digital media offers great possibilities to present cultural heritage: visitors can interactively explore content and the content can be dynamically presented according to the situation in the exhibition. For instance, little content may be presented in larger letters if the visitor is standing far away from the exhibit, but if the visitor is coming closer, a larger body of content can be presented using smaller font sizes. One major goal of the meSch project is the development and integration of interactive technology into museum installations that senses visitors' actions in an exhibition and presents digital content according to the visitors' actions, such as position, visit trajectory, language preference, age or interest. We aim not only to empower curators and cultural heritage professionals but also interaction designers to design digital museum experiences and to build interactive exhibitions. Thus, we present here the meSch platform that enables to easily setup interactions in exhibitions. We present the general meSch concept, highlight the Plinth, a prototype that allows measuring the distance of visitors to an exhibit, and describe how the Plinth can enrich exhibitions as interactive component. Finally, we elaborate the iterative design process of the Plinth including an evaluation in an interactive exhibition as well as a re-design based on the results of this evaluation. Interactive exhibition. Proxemics interaction. Architectural guidance.

Envisioning, designing, and rapid prototyping heritage installations with a tangible interaction toolkit

“…The editing of the content and its conditions (based on an abstract representation of files and tags) diverges from the popular map-based editing (Fidas et al, 2015;Katifori et al, 2014), as mapbased editing does not support interactions that are not defined by the space such as single interactive installations (Wolf et al, 2015), single object augmentation (Van der Vaart & Damala, 2015), or the printing of personalized souvenirs (Not et al, 2017;Petrelli et al, 2016). 5 As such the meSch Authoring Tool allows to model a more extensive set of tangible interactions.…”

Empowering cultural heritage professionals with tools for authoring and deploying personalised visitor experiences

“…A few of those concepts were later implemented as exploratory prototypes to have a sense of what tangible and embodied interactions feel like when used, e.g. a digitally augmented book or a belt to deliver narratives in outdoor historical sites (Petrelli et al 2016a), an augmented plinth to display digital information around exhibit objects (Wolf et al 2015 (Aoki et al 2002), and hamper the social experience of a group visiting together, this being the most common scenario (Falk 2009). Particularly when tangible and embodied interactions are used, aspects of social interaction have to be considered (Hornecker 2010 (Petrelli et al 2016a).…”

“…15 The "Appliance" tab shows the devices used and their tagging that specify the context they represent (left) and the editing panel for adding details about the specific hardware (right) creation of museum guides. Despite its appeal, however, a map-based interface would not fit many settings of tangible interaction that are not defined by the space such as single interactive installations (Wolf et al 2015; in press), single object augmentation (Damala et al 2016), or the printing of personalised tangible souvenirs (Petrelli et al 2016a;Not et al 2017). Furthermore, designing with a physical map of the exhibition precludes the use of the authoring environment for online experiences where the same content can be organised in different ways (further online exploration after a visit based on the topics of interest (Petrelli et al 2016b) or online summaries of the visit); it also makes it difficult to adjust an exhibition to a different physical environment (e.g., travelling exhibitions) thus limiting reuse and repurpose.…”

1 | 2 | 2020 Fusions

“…We argue that digitisation brings a primacy to the object-audience encounter which not only reduces the reliance on a proscriptive text-based interpretation of an object but also gives the visitor agency over their own engagement with the object. The possibilities for digital engagement abound, from visitor engagement with object surrogates and narrative responses to objects created and recorded by visitors (Ferris et al 2004), to exhibits that sense users and project content at them -altering the size of projection based on user distance from the object (Wolf et al 2015), to "digital augmentation" of tangible museum objects ) and generative 3-D object creation of museum objects with open accessibility for printing and remixing (Smithsonian 2020). In fact, certain digital aspects are expected by museum visitors and are becoming universal elements of exhibitions.…”