Abstract
This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a co-design process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation.
Highlights
Since the first experiments of the late 90s, personalisation applied to cultural heritage visits has been seen as a way to improve the overall visitor’s experience
Our research lays at the intersection between three areas: interaction design—an extended user-centred study on the practice of exhibition design, which fed our effort to create an easy-to-use tool for cultural heritage professionals (CHPs); personalisation—the tool had to enable the creation of personalised experiences in cultural contexts; and the Internet of Things—the personalised visiting experiences must have a tangible or embodied component
Through this exercise of envisaging and prototyping, we developed an understanding of what makes an interactive experience successful, what are the ambitions of the CHPs, and which criteria hold across heritage settings:
Summary
Since the first experiments of the late 90s, personalisation applied to cultural heritage visits has been seen as a way to improve the overall visitor’s experience. By fitting with the work of cultural heritage professionals (CHPs), we aim to open the way toward personalisation becoming deployable in real settings: an easy-to-use authoring environment will enable CHPs to use personalisation to adapt both the content delivered to and the interaction with visitors, and to monitor the quality of adaptive experiences from the design to the actual onsite delivery This approach requires the designing of the collaboration between the system and its human user by: (1) defining when the automatic mechanisms are appropriate and when, instead, the judgement should be left to the author, and (2) to synchronise the activities of the two agents (the computer and the human) to achieve a superior quality of results.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
