Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visitors. This paper presents a study of a mixed reality system that allows web, virtual reality and physical visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. Our system allows visitors to share their location and orientation, communicate over a voice channel, and jointly navigate around a shared information space. Results from a study of 34 users of the system show that visiting with the system was highly interactive and retained many of the attractions of a traditional shared exhibition visit. Specifically, users could navigate together, collaborate around objects and discuss exhibits. These findings have implications for non-museum settings, in particular how location awareness is a powerful resource for collaboration, and how 'hybrid objects' can support collaboration at-a-distance.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul M. Aoki , Rebecca E. Grinter , Amy Hurst , Margaret H. Szymanski , James D. Thornton , Allison Woodruff, Sotto voce: exploring the interplay of conversation and mobile audio spaces, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503454]
• 2: Billinghurst, M., Karo, H. and Poupyrev, I. The MagicBook: A Transitional AR interface. Computer Graphics, 25. 745--753.
• 3: Wolfram Burgard , Armin B. Cremers , Dieter Fox , Dirk Hähnel , Gerhard Lakemeyer , Dirk Schulz , Walter Steiner , Sebastian Thrun, The interactive museum tour-guide robot, Proceedings of the fifteenth national/tenth conference on Artificial intelligence/Innovative applications of artificial intelligence, p.11-18, July 1998, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
• 4: David N. Snowdon , Alan J. Munro , Elizabeth F. Churchill, Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Places and Spaces for Interaction, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2001
• 5: Paul Dourish , Annette Adler , Victoria Bellotti , Austin Henderson, Your place or mine? Learning from long-term use of audio-video communication, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.5 n.1, p.33-62, 1996
• 6: Franklin, N. Language as a means of constructing and conveying cognitive maps. in Portugali, J. ed. The construction of cognitive maps, Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht, 1995, 275--295.
• 7: Galani, A. and Chalmers, M. Can you see me? Exploring co-visiting between physical and virtual visitors. in Proceedings of museums and the Web 2002, Archives and museum infomatics, Boston, Mass., 2002, 31--40.
• 8: Goffman, E. Alienation from Interaction. in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Doubleday, New York, 1967, 113--136.
• 9: Christian Heath , Paul Luff, Technology in Action, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2000
• 10: Heath, C., Luff, P., et al. Creating coherent environments for collaboration. in Prinz, W., Jarke, M., et al. eds. Proceedings of ECSCW '01, Bonn, Germany, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2001, 119--138.
• 11: Jon Hindmarsh , Mike Fraser , Christian Heath , Steve Benford , Chris Greenhalgh, Object-focused interaction in collaborative virtual environments, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.7 n.4, p.477-509, Dec. 2000 [doi>10.1145/365058.365088]
• 12: Boriana Koleva , Holger Schnädelbach , Steve Benford , Chris Greenhalgh, Traversable interfaces between real and virtual worlds, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.233-240, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/332040.332437]
• 13: Henry Lieberman , Neil W. Van Dyke , Adrian S. Vivacqua, Let's browse: a collaborative Web browsing agent, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.65-68, January 05-08, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/291080.291092]
• 14: Ian MacColl , Dave Millard , Cliff Randell , Anthony Steed , Barry Brown , Steve Benford , Matthew Chalmers , Ruth Conroy , Nick Dalton , Areti Galani , Chris Greenhalgh , Danius Michaelides , Tom Rodden , Ian Taylor , Mark Weal, Shared visiting in EQUATOR city, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Collaborative virtual environments, p.88-94, September 30-October 02, 2002, Bonn, Germany [doi>10.1145/571878.571892]
• 15: Martin, D. Audio guides. Museum Practice, 5 (1). 71--81.
• 16: Not, E., Petrelli, D., et al. Person-oriented guided visits in a physical museum. in ICHIM?97, Archives and Museum Informatics, Paris, 1997.
• 17: Cliff Randell , Henk L. Muller, Low Cost Indoor Positioning System, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, p.42-48, September 30-October 02, 2001, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• 18: Semper, R. and Spasojevic, M. The Electronic Guidebook: Using Portable Devices and a Wireless Web-based Network to Extend the Museum Experience. in Museums and the web, Archives and museum infomatics, 2002.
• 19: Serell, B. Using behaviour to define the effectiveness of exhibitions. in Bicknell, S. and Farmelo, G. eds. Museum Visitors Studies in the 90s, Science Museum, London, 1993, 140--144.
• 20: University of Nottingham. Deliverable 1.1: Hybrid physical-digital artefacts, Shape, Nottingham, UK, 2001.
• 21: vom Lehn, D., Heath, C. and Hindmarsh, J. Exhibiting Interaction: Conduct and Collaboration in Museums and Galleries. Symbolic Interaction, 24 (2). 189--216.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human information processing; Human factors

Keywords:
WWW, context-awareness, location-awareness, mixed reality, museum visiting, virtual reality