technologies can be used to gather and present personalized information offers new
opportunities for more effective and attractive interactions and communications between
museums and their visitors, and also the visitors among themselves.
1.2 Problem Statement
The creation of a system to help facilitate the interaction and exploration of a structured
space is not a new topic. Several such systems are reviewed in detail in Chapter 2:
Literature Review. However, most previous research focuses on technology to guide the
user or present them with additional information about the exhibits and often serve as
electronic tour guides. They don't use or explore advantages in the advanced information
and communication technologies to move from simple “mobility” to a “personalized”
framework, i.e. call to individuals instead of locations [6].
There are other features missing in previous proposed systems. Museums often
overwhelm the visitor with information. Everyone tends to want to view and learn
something and while different objects in a museum can resonate greatly with individuals
in the moment, users are often mentally and physically exhausted after their visit. It
becomes hard for them to easily remember or articulate specifics of what they learned. It
is only after some time later that some other object, event, or story will bring back the
memory of the experiences they had within the museum [7].
This thesis seeks to address some of the above issues through the design, development,
and evaluation of four different visual narratives. Explained fully in the literature review,
visual narratives are presentations using text, multimedia content and often interactive
4
elements, to convey a narrative. Narrative visualization doesn't just seek to use images to
illustrate a story. It seeks to fundamentally convey information through both textual and
visual narrative. It tries to present the data in a holistic fashion [25].
This research project seeks to study how to best allow visitors to construct one of four
visual narratives that enable them to reflect upon and communicate what they
experienced in a museum and share and present their experiences in a museum with
another.