Abstract. This paper presents a collaborative experience designed to support learning in two remotely located museums sharing a common exhibition. A remote collaborative multi-touch experience offers an additional channel for museum visitors to explore the exhibition and increase the sense of connectedness and awareness between the two spaces. The experience flow includes stages offering opportunities for exploration, negotiation and cooperation. The paper describes the design and implementation of a system that allows simultaneous collaborative interaction and communication through two multi-touch surfaces augmented with videoconferencing. The system allows museum visitors to communicate with remote participants and with their peers. Finally, the paper discusses preliminary observations of end-users, and cultural organizations using the prototype. This work provides a use case for social interactive experiences that could draw museum visitors to further explore an exhibition and share their views and interpretation with others.

Abstract. This paper presents a customizable system used to develop a collaborative multi-user problem solving game. It addresses the increasing demand for appealing informal learning experiences in museum-like settings. The system facilitates remote collaboration by allowing groups of learners to communicate through a videoconferencing system and by allowing them to simultaneously interact through a shared multi-touch interactive surface. A user study with 20 user groups indicates that the game facilitates collaboration between local and remote groups of learners. The videoconference and multitouch surface acted as communication channels, attracted students' interest, facilitated engagement, and promoted inter-and intra-group collaborationfavoring intra-group collaboration. Our findings suggest that augmenting videoconferencing systems with a shared multitouch space offers new possibilities and scenarios for remote collaborative environments and collaborative learning.