From Informing to Remembering: Deploying a Ubiquitous System in an Interactive Science Museum
6 Choosing a Tool(การเลือกเครื่องมือ)
The studies of Exploratorium users without technological assistance (Section 3) and with it (Sections 4 and 5) led us to the following conclusions:
Cooltown physical hyperlinks are an effective mechanism for invoking services in a place such as the Exploratorium where navigation and identification are difficult, though some details (e.g. accidental beacon pickup) need improvement.
The hands-on nature of the Exploratorium made informing and suggesting more distracting than useful, except to those users who wanted to explore an already-familiar exhibit more deeply
The PDA’s are too large and fragile to be convenient for users who want to experiment with the exhibits, given the relative boisterousness of the environment.
The combination of several functions (Informer, Suggester and Remember) was too complex, e.g. users were too busy with the first two functionalities to use Rememberer.
We were thus led to design a simpler system, concentrating on one basic tool.
One option would be to implement a pure version of Informer or Suggester, but in a less obtrusive form factor. For example, content could be displayed on screens mounted on or near exhibits (though this might distract in a different way). Or simplified text content could be delivered using a small-screen wearable device.
However, we believe that the critical resource is the user’s attention. Consulting the PDA requires the user to repeatedly shift attention between the virtual world of content and the physical world of the exhibit, the user’s companions, and the surrounding environment (see Figure 3). The transitions require physical manipulation (e.g. removing the PDA from a belt clip or pouch), shifting visual attention and reestablishing visual context, and cognitive effort.
Fig. 4. A Rememberer page showing a user’s visit to the “Spinning Blackboard” exhibit.
This analysis would suggest that physical/virtual transitions would be less distracting if they occur less often and/or between exhibits, when users would already be making a transition between different physical objects, a likely usage pattern for Guider and Communicator. Rememberer should dramatically reduce the number of transitions, because the user can maintain their attention on the physical world while visiting exhibits--except when taking actions necessary to record phenomena--and cross to the virtual world when consulting their recorded information at home or at an in-museum kiosk. We chose to concentrate on Rememberer for this reason and because our guidebook users expressed a strong interest in it.
7 On to Rememberer
Rememberer is a tool that helps the user create a personal record of their visit to the Exploratorium, primarily for access after their visit. It is intended to aid personal recall, stimulate discussions and other forms of social interaction, and support the user’s research or classroom work. It consists of:
• a “remember-this” technology with which the user selects objects during their visit;
• the visit record, consisting of a set of web pages;
• a physical artifact that reminds the user of the visit and contains a pointer (URL) to the visit record.
Because the remember-this technology performs a very simple task, its handheld unit can be kept correspondingly simple and small. For our initial tests, we used RFID tags (some credit-card shaped and some mounted in watches). Bringing the tag within about 10 cm of the pi station’s reader (“swiping”) registers the exhibit under the user’s pseudonym and causes an LED to light up briefly.
In addition to a list of exhibit names, in order visited, we included pointers to detailed content for each exhibit and a field for users to record comments. Moreover, to make the record more specific to the user’s personal experiences of the exhibits, we also equipped the pi-stations with cameras. Figure 4 shows a page created at the “Spinning Blackboard” exhibit.
When the user swiped their ID card, four photographs were taken at 1-second intervals. The cameras were positioned to take a picture of users at the exhibit or (for one exhibit) a phenomenon that the user had created on the exhibit. The pictures were not displayed at the exhibit: users saw them only later when inspecting their visit records.
Before visiting the exhibits, users swipe their tag at a “basestation” to register themselves with the system and get a pseudonym. It also creates and displays the beginning of their visit record, including a picture of the user visiting the basestation. This gives users brief hands-on practice with the system and a mental picture of what artifact the system is generating during their visit.
For our initial tests, we observed and informally interviewed 14 adults, all but one employees or volunteers at the Exploratorium. 6 visited the exhibits alone and 8 were in groups of two to three. One group shared a tag but otherwise all users had their own tag. Users viewed their visit records at the end of the visit. A laptop was also available for viewing their record during the visit, but only some chose to use it; those who chose not to still swiped their tags at the exhibits.
Users reacted very positively to the system overall. They were especially stimulated by the photographs, even though the images were often blurred and of low resolution, and even though the users were not clear about exactly when the pictures would be taken (the only feedback was the RFID reader’s LED which lit at about the time of the first photograph in the sequence of four). Users almost always did swipe their tags at the exhibits, sometimes several times to capture particular phenomena. They did so casually but accurately, with no indication that this disturbed their engagement with the exhibit or their companions.
We gave the users the URLs of their pages and logged visits to their Web pages after they left. Most revisited the pages, some several weeks after the event. Several of those saved comments within their pages, referring to the photographs. We prototyped personalised fridge magnets and postcards as artefacts that recorded the URLs of the users’ pages.
In summary, we have preliminary evidence that Rememberer has approximately the “right” amount of physical-virtual interaction to add value to a visit to the Exploratorium without distracting from the experience. We are currently doing more extensive studies.
8 Conclusion
The Exploratorium is an interesting environment for nomadic computing design because its physical environment already requires much of the user’s personal resources, e.g. eyes, hands, mental attention. A successful nomadic tool must, therefore, provide a valuable service while making only very small demands on these resources. Rememberer seems the right level of complexity; our initial electronic guidebook was too distracting (except for particular classes of users, such as teachers or explainers, who wanted to go beyond their familiarity with the exhibits).
Nomadic computing applications cover a wide range of environments. Electronic guidebooks have been shown [2][3][6][14] to work well in museums, historic buildings, and historic towns. These environments are often quieter, not hands-on, and/or more clearly organized than the Exploratorium. We expect our findings to generalize to environments which also place high demands on a user (e.g. shopping with children in tow).
Our studies also provide preliminary evidence that mere bookmarking of physical objects, together with basic photographic capability, may be sufficient to provide a valuable service to nomadic users. We are currently running more experiments to investigate this hypothesis.
Finally, this study illustrates the value of incorporating prototype deployment and user testing in the early stages of developing a nomadic computing tool, despite the substantial investment of time required to do so. Demos inside HP labs gave us little preparation for the conditions we found inside the Exploratorium. For our specific application, the change in environments led to a radical change in tool design.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the rest of the team (both HP and Exploratorium staff) who helped design and implement these experiments: Katherina Audley, Doug Conaway, Philippe Debaty, Caroline Gattein, Joshua Gutwill-Wise, Ron Hipschmann, Mike Petrich, Natalie Rusk, Rob Semper, Larry Shaw, Quan Tran, Adrian Van Allen, Noel Wanner, Karen Wilkinson. The Exploratorium’s work on the electronic guidebook was funded by NSF grant ESI-9901985.