Interacting with the past

Abstract

We propose an application that allows a museum audience to interact with the past and to appreciate the value of antique objects through multimedia installations. Discussions in this article are based on our experiences in developing the Mao-Kung Cauldron time perception journey multimedia application. This installation was inspired by the Mao-Kung Cauldron, an ancient bronze cauldron in the collection of the National Palace Museum known for its historical significance. The question, however, lies in how to create an experience in which the audiences can interact with the past. To address this issue, the research team used the Kinect-based breath detection and deterioration/recovery simulation technologies to develop the application. This installation is the first application linked to Kinect-based breath detection and deterioration/recovery simulation technologies. The main contribution of this work is the analysis of design concepts, design decisions, and evaluations in a museum setting. We conduct a control group study to compare the outcomes between the experimental group (Mao-Kung Cauldron time perception journey multimedia application) and control group (asynchronous web-based kiosk). Both the quantitative (questionnaire survey) and qualitative methods (observation) are used to analyze the collected data. This work proposes a feasibility design to let museum audiences experience the features of cultural object by the virtual time perception journey application. Ping Hung. 2014. Interacting with the Past: Creating a time perception journey experience using kinect-based breath detection and deterioration and recovery simulation technologies. ACM J. Comput.

A Literature Review of User Studies in Extended Reality Applications for Archaeology

“…Similarly, in the MayaArch3D project [66], a virtual reconstruction of the ancient Maya city of Copan, can be explored. Interestingly, the work in [37] uses breath recognition through the body movement as a way to control the interaction.…”

“…The medium-sample participant size (between 20 and 100 participants) is usually gathered for museum-exhibition-or laboratory-based system evaluation that needs to reach a certain threshold of observations to have significant evidence in their measurements based on statistical power analysis [21]. Besides, the installation and conduct of system evaluation in a great exhibition or a big museum hall facilitate the collection of large number of participants through visitors (more than 100) [14,18,32,37,61,64]. For some user studies, the number of participants was not available [28,47,66].…”

“…Indeed, the concept of the flow of time is very central in archaeology [36]. To highlight the change of time, there exist metaphors deriving from philosophical concepts [37] that can be referred to, or body sensations [28] that focus on breath. In these last cases, the human-centric part of human-computer interaction gains more importance.…”

“…[32] [50] [63] experience feedback [53] technology acceptance model [32] user acceptance [24] appreciation [37] playability [73] stimulation [62] attraction [37] motivation [69] emotional response [76] immersion [9] [68] object presence [ spacial presence [63] cultural presence [65] sense of presence [20] [44] perceived task overload [63] task load [75] engagement [16] [64]…”