Abstract
Today, museum visits are perceived as an opportunity for individuals to explore and make up their own minds. The increasing technical capabilities of Augmented Reality (AR) technology have raised audience expectations, advancing the use of mobile AR in cultural heritage (CH) settings. Hence, there is the need to define a criteria, based on users’ preference, able to drive developers and insiders toward a more conscious development of AR-based applications. Starting from previous research (performed to define a protocol for understanding the visual behaviour of subjects looking at paintings), this paper introduces a truly predictive model of the museum visitor’s visual behaviour, measured by an eye tracker. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) approach is presented, able to predict users’ attention in front of a painting. Furthermore, this research compares users’ behaviour between adults and children, expanding the results to different kind of users, thus providing a reliable approach to eye trajectories. Tests have been conducted defining areas of interest (AOI) and observing the most visited ones, attempting the prediction of subsequent transitions between AOIs. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and suitability of our approach, with performance evaluation values that exceed 90%.
Highlights
Museum visits are perceived as an opportunity for individuals to explore and make up their own minds, and to test their own interpretations instead of the experts’; they have become a tool of entertainment like theaters or cinemas
The results are given for each areas of interest (AOI) in which the examined painting is divided
In the painting taken in the exam “The Ideal City”, we can observe that the attention is focused on the central area, because subjects generally are attracted to the area in the painting with the most relevant particular
Summary
Museum visits are perceived as an opportunity for individuals to explore and make up their own minds, and to test their own interpretations instead of the experts’; they have become a tool of entertainment like theaters or cinemas. Throughout time, museums and art galleries have preserved our important Cultural Heritage (CH) and served as important sources of education and learning. Visitors are increasingly taking an active role within museums. The visitor experience is not adequately described by understanding the content, the design of exhibitions, or even by understanding visit frequency or the social arrangements in which people enter the museum. To get a more complete answer to the questions of why people do or do not visit museums, what they do there, and what learning/meaning they derive from the experience, researchers’ efforts have been aimed at better describing and understanding the museum visitors’ experience.
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