Can you see me?Exploring social interaction between

physical and virtual visitors

Areti Galani & Matthew Chalmers

University of Glasgow

The City project

• Set within the Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration– “integrating the physical with the digital”

• Weaving new media into museum experience– social context across local & remote visitors– ‘co-visiting’ that spans several media– expansion to other institutions, spaces, streets…

The City project

• Three strands of research– technology development: mobile devices,

hypermedia, virtual environments– studies of visitors and evaluation of use– theory and design practice

• Technology design that fits and enriches the visit

• A good visit requires engaging and contextually appropriate information

Why social context?

• Museum visiting is a social experience– influenced by the social interactions with

companions, other visitors and staff visitor

• Social context of technology users is usually underestimated

• Web–based technology rarely supports direct social interaction– but some examples: shared virtual

museums and shared web tours

Why across media?

• Increasing numbers of remote visitors– use of digital media prior to and as follow-up to

traditional visit– a digital visit is a real and physical visit– reconsideration of curatorial /educational practice and

quality of access to collections

• Use of new media within traditional museum– used concurrently but individually– possibility for ‘co-visiting’ between local and remote

visitors

• Vee, Anna & Dub– three archetypal visitors to the Lighthouse’s

Mackintosh Room– wearable, VR and hypermedia visitors

• Audio connections & awareness of position

• Content delivered based on position– ‘straw man’ content: the exhibition catalogue

Current Scenario

jornada photo

Dub sees a map along with a web page created by the Linky hypermedia system. Overlaid on top of the Mackintosh Room structures on the map are the zones with triggered content, shown in red. For this presentation, we have also added the names of the three visitors.

Initial Experience

• Positioning & reference still difficult– establishing mutual reference through talk– even though Vee’s face and pointer are in VR

• Mapping between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ objects unproblematic– radar display is used by Vee to help Anna

‘Real Soon Now’

• Content delivery based on the social context and history of activity in the space– based on paths through space/information – supporting the visitor in showing his/her path to

their co–visitors as they describe or recommend parts of their experience

– programs offering playback or summary of past activity, and selected recommendations of particular parts of past activity

Ongoing Visitor Studies

• The Lighthouse, Glasgow • The House for an Art Lover, Glasgow

• Qualitative studies in ethnographic style – Participant observation: non-obtrusive– Understand the experience from the visitor’s

perspective– Attempt to answer the ‘how’ questions and not

just the ‘what’ question

Categorising Co-Visitors

• Tightly coupled– stay close together, close/joint interaction with

displays, obvious assignment of roles

• Loosely coupled– separate use of displays, constant awareness of

each other, frequent discussion/interaction

• Independent – may move through different rooms, different paces,

peripheral/intermittent awareness

How Visitors Manage Interaction

• Co-ordination and negotiation • Visibility

– gaze, looking at/for people

• Audibility

– Display-related comments (annotations), instructions, chatting

• Mobility

– gesture, body movement, orientation, proximity

How Visitors Manage Interaction

• Current focus, interest, engagement • Intentions for the future

– where to go next, tiredness

• Past experience– of earlier visits, of this visit

• Use of all the above as resources in their engagement with displays

Ideas and Issues for Design

• Expression through mobility & gesture– body language, gaze, pointing out details– walking not jumping

• Showing one’s history to a co-visitor– a resource for relating display or artefact to

other artefacts, visits, institutions & activities – a guide for a moment - not the entire visit

Ongoing and Future Work

• Studies of tourists and visitors in the city

• Initial system trials in the Lighthouse

• Expansion to streets and other institutions

• Adaptive information/exhibitions– create associations within a museum

collection, between collections, and between collections and the city

Conclusion

• Current virtual museums often sterile & dead– one person, space, medium and collection

• Shift from collection/information to experience– in museum practice and technology design

• Bridging and blurring boundaries– local and remote, real/physical & virtual/digital– activity before, during and after traditional visit– high culture and low culture– visitor and designer/curator

www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~areti

www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~matthew

www.equator.ac.uk/projects/city

• All those lovely, lovely people – Ian MacColl, Barry Brown, Anthony Steed, Sheep,

Ruth Conroy, Cliff Randell, Dave Millard, Mark Weal, Dan Michaelidis, Ian Taylor, Chris Greenhalgh, Tom Rodden, Bill Gaver

– Lynn Bennett, Stuart MacDonald, Dorothy MacKay

• Hewlett Packard, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Thanks