Exploring Whole-Body Interaction and Design for Museums

Abstract

Museums increasingly use digital technology to enhance exhibition experiences for families, notably in relation to physically mediated installations for young children through Natural User Interfaces. Yet little is known about how families and children engage with such installations and the kinds of interactive experiences they engender in museum spaces. This paper addresses a pressing need for research to adopt an analytical focus on the body during such digitally mediated interactions in order to understand how such bodily interaction contributes to meaning making in the museum context. It reports an observation study of families and children interacting with an interactive Kinect-based installation in a museum exhibit on rareChinese paintings. The study shows how the installation design engenders particular forms of bodily interaction, collaboration and meaning making. It also contributes design insights into whole body interaction installations in museums and public spaces. Author KeywordsHuman computer interaction, Natural User Interface, Whole-body Interaction, User studies, Children, Interactive learning environments, Novel interaction devices Research Highlights Examining the design of Whole Body Interaction (WBI) for museum engagement  Observation study of families and children engaged in WBI in a art based museum installation  Making meaning through bodily engagement eliciting cause and effect relationships  Different forms of collaborative interaction through physically mediated communication  Contributes empirically grounded design insights to inform the use and design of WBI exhibits in museums

SharedPhys

“…Similar to prior work in whole-body interaction [59,62], we found that games were successful in building engagement. This finding extended even to reporters who were not wearing sensors and whose data was not being visualized.…”

“…As noted in the introduction, though an emerging area, prior work suggests that these computer-mediated, whole-body interactions can promote and support engagement [1,62], immersion [69], sensorimotor development [30], social interaction [59,69] as well as learning (see [31] for a review). Most closely related to our work are the tools STEP [12] and SMALLab [4,26].…”

“…Often citing the role of embodiment in cognition [56], others have explored utilizing the entire body through movement or gesture to support new forms of computer-mediated learning [31,34]. Though a nascent area, research suggests that these whole-body interactions can help increase engagement [1,62] and immersion [1,69], support and shape social interaction [59,69], and aid learning [31].…”

Learning about the past through situatedness, embodied exploration and digital augmentation of cultural heritage sites

“…Despite the different content displayed, enclosed museum exhibitions often tend to follow general design principles (Hornecker et al, 2014) and thus allow a wide range of advanced interfaces and interaction techniques. Recent studies focus particularly on how visitors' learning experience can be supported during the visit in the museum by interacting with large-scale environments (Flynn, 2013;Kenderdine et al, 2014;Kourakis et al, 2012;Pietroni and Adami, 2014;Price et al, 2015), mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones (Lanir et al, 2016;Rennick-Egglestone et al, 2013), mobile eye tracking technologies (Mokatren et al, 2016), or smart tangible objects (Marshall et al, 2016). In contrast, in the context of designing for outdoor heritage sites, museum experts often have to consider very specific requirements and constraints (Hornecker et al, 2014), e.g.…”

“…However, there are still aspects of historical contexts and people's practices in past cultures that are difficult for visitors to imagine (Ciolfi and McLoughlin, 2012). Therefore, there is a growing trend in the exploration of the benefits of ubiquitous computing advanced interfaces (Gena et al, 2016) and context-aware digital augmentation to provide additional information layers within the physical world (Price et al, 2015). In this context, relevant contributions can be found in Augmented Reality (AR) solutions.…”