The resulting software is an Objective-C native iPhone. OS application deployed on iPod touch devices, which relies heavily upon the primitive Webkit HTML 5 ...
Towards an Environment for Designing and Evaluating Multimedia Art Guides Augusto Celentano, Renzo Orsini and Fabio Pittarello Dipartimento di Informatica, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia {auce,orsini,pitt}@dsi.unive.it
ABSTRACT
exhibition visitor with a comprehensive context about the exhibition content including historical, cultural, social and environmental information, aiming at raising a participative emotional mood leading to a multi-facet experience [3, 4, 5]. At the other side, the project aims at building a development environment extending the traditional concept of multimedia repository with multiple perspectives, multiple interaction styles, a variety of devices and the adaptation to several categories of users. The latter goal is certainly not new, but very few experiences exist in real world exhibitions even in primary cultural institutions. Multimedia guides are available in many museums and exhibits, but they are most of times limited to audio-only contents or to standard animated presentations, giving the visitor a poor sample of the cultural richness surrounding art. There are many reasons for such limitation, the most relevant being the need to obey property rights, which demands for restricted circulation of artwork related materials, or conversely demand expensive royalties to set up satisfying multimedia content. We too have experienced such constraints and in one case we had to face a severe limitation of content with respect to the initial guide design. Giving a visitor a comprehensive information and context about an art exhibition has different facets depending on the exhibition theme and organization. We closely followed two exhibitions, very different by nature, content and target.
We discuss the design and implementation environment of a family of multimedia guides for art exhibitions on Apple iPod touch devices.The project aims at developing a unique framework adaptable to different content types and presentation styles, while retaining a common interface model with consistent gestures and a fast development process based on standard environments and toolkits. Evaluation is based on automatic collection of information about the user behavior by logging user actions.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Systems]: Information Interfaces and Presentation—User Interfaces; J.5 [Computer Applications]: Arts and Humanities
Keywords Information access, rich multimedia content, Webkit
1.
INTRODUCTION
In this paper we present emerging results of a project about the conception, design and evaluation of multimedia content and systems for art fruition. The project involves the Departments of Computer Science and of Art History and Conservation of Cultural Heritage of Universit` a Ca’ Foscari Venezia; it was set up in 2008 and its first on field applications were two art exhibitions held at Ca’ Foscari in 2009 that are described later in this section. In 2010 the project will support two other events: a third exhibition organized by Ca’ Foscari featuring a selection of XX Century Russian art from two private collections, and a partnership with Palazzo Grassi to design multimedia catalogs for the Pinault International Center for Contemporary Art at Punta della Dogana in Venice. The main goal of the project was twofold: at one side, to experiment rich multimedia content delivered through portable devices and large public displays to engage an art
(a)
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. AVI ’10, May 25–29, 2010, Rome, Italy. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-4503-0076-6/10/05 ...$10.00.
(b) Figure 1: Screenshots from (a) the Nigra Sum art guide, (b) the Nauman art guide
93
Tag cloud Map Help
Start
Start Map
Section menu
tap
select
sections
artist menu
catalog
catalog en nd n d end selection
menu Main menu
menu Main menu
sections menu
menu
catalog selection
items selection
selection Content menu
Catalog
Artist menu
Catalog tap
tap
Detail menu
Description Details Section Map Catalog Main menu
Description Presentation
Presentation
(a)
Presentation
(b)
Figure 2: Structure of the two guides: (a) Nigra Sum, (b) Nauman The first exhibition, Nigra Sum Sed Formosa. Sacred and Beauty in Christian Ethiopia, was a quite niche exhibition about Ethiopian religious art, with objects and testimonials from private collections giving a comprehensive look on the historical and environmental features of the conception of sacred in that African region. The exhibition itself featured several multimedia materials: archive video reports, musical landscapes, animated presentations about life style, interviews with experts and curators, etc.. The multimedia guide was conceived as a “visitor’s companion” able to explain details about the objects on display but also to frame them in a coherent global picture. The second exhibition, Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens was a section of the USA participation to the Venice Biennale, featuring a limited number of installations. Since many of the artworks had multimedia contents our support was limited to providing the personal guides for the visitors. In the following the two exhibitions and the guides will be denoted as Nigra Sum and Nauman, respectively. A general presentation of the project and details about the design choices and the organization of the two guides are in [1, 2].
2.
DESIGNING THE MULTIMEDIA GUIDE STRUCTURE
Figure 1 shows representative screenshots from the two guides. Figure 2 shows their (simplified) navigational structure. In both figures it is easy to perceive they stem from a common design: both of them include a catalog based and a map based access, leading to a detailed presentation for each work of art displayed in the exhibition. The Nigra Sum guide is more complex because it includes additional thematic access paths to information organized in sections orthogonal to the physical layout. Information related to each artwork is also richer, including additional details such as zoomable images and references to the proper thematic context. The Nauman guide is simpler due to the small number of artworks and to the lack of thematic based access. The Nigra Sum guide is organized in four different chap-
94
ters. A set of thematic sections introduce the exhibition content with a cultural background according to six themes. The artworks are accessed by several catalogs: a general catalog collects all the artworks, while partial catalogs group artworks by section and by room. Each artwork is introduced by a short text and by an audio comment, and is detailed by one or more images that can be zoomed in with iPod-style pinch gestures; in some cases a longer audiovisual presentation shows more information through animations and slide shows. A set of maps allows visitors to access the artworks contained in each room. User may also access information by selecting keywords from a tag cloud, grouping multimedia presentations by evocative words that are orthogonal to the exhibition sections. The graphic appearance has an important evocative role in suggesting atmospheres and themes. Therefore, real images from the artworks and from the Ethiopian art context have been used to identify the different contents, instead of symbolically styled icons. We have given great importance to the content access by section, a feature usually missing in traditional audioguides, which are based on the exhibition items. It permits the users to be aware of the cultural, geographical and historical context in which the artworks were conceived. As we shall discuss in Section 4, this approach is useful for going beyond the physical layout of the exhibition, evidencing relations between artworks displayed in different rooms. Such approach represents an advancement if compared with most of the typical museum guides, where the user attention is immediately guided to the specific object, ignoring the whole context.
3.
TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
An ad-hoc web-based content management system has been developed to simplify the task of providing content by the art scholars. The interface to the CMS allows the user to insert both structured data about each artwork (such as name, dates, author, room, technique, etc.), as well as multimedia
Content Author
Content Author
Content Author
Artworks data
Images and text documents
Audio and a/v documents
ure 3 also shows how the different roles and skills involved in the application design could operate independently for reaching the final goal. Indeed, a major result of this experience is the definition of a work process and of a set of reusable components available for further projects. The different tools helped us to speed-up the design and implementation process by the different components of the work team, decoupling the design of the application that manages the multimedia content during the interaction phase from the design of the interface, the implementation of the CMS that aggregates content in HTML pages and the production of multimedia content. Indeed, some of the components developed for the first guide have been completely reused in the guide for the contemporary art exhibition without interfering with the development of the new content. Due to the limited number of artworks included we avoided to set up dynamic pages, reusing the core of the native application and implementing by direct writing the content of the catalog and of the artwork descriptive screens.
Web Application External CMS
CMS developer
Interface Designer
Artworks database
Interface templates
XHTML documents System Developer
Multimedia storage
Internal CMS
Log Data
WebKit Engine
Visitor
Device
Figure 3: The system architecture
4.
information about it: a principal image, processed to derive icons and thumbnails for the CMS interface, other images in different formats, audio comment, texts, videos, etc.. Such material is packaged in a Sqlite relational database and in a file system, which constitute the data repository transferred to the iPod device, ready to be used by the internal content management system. The schema of the data managed by the CMS is not fixed but can be configured by the user to accommodate the needs of different exhibitions and different types of artworks. Information items are organized according to user defined attributes within a set of predefined data types that include text, image, audio and video files in formats accepted by the iPod architecture. The need for such a dynamic architecture arises from the guide organization model: users can follow different paths to the artworks pages and multimedia material. The CMS creates a basic artwork page instantiating the content items and providing the correct link structure for each navigational path: general catalog, partial catalogs for rooms and thematic sections, and history. The basic artwork pages and the catalog pages are created from HTML templates designed by the interface designer. Such templates are included in the packaged application and used together with static pages which implement the basic navigational structure of the visit. The resulting software is an Objective-C native iPhone OS application deployed on iPod touch devices, which relies heavily upon the primitive Webkit HTML 5 rendering engine of the operating system. One of the benefits of the modular architecture is the possibility of monitoring the user behavior at a logical level: every user action (on static and on dynamic pages) is intercepted and stored in an internal log. The logs of all the devices are asynchronously transferred to a server, where they are integrated building the base of the data used for the product evaluation (see Section 4). Figure 3 shows the functional architecture of the development environment. It has been used at full extent for implementing the first guide, while the minor complexity of the second guide led us to avoid the use of the CMS by hand coding the single catalog page and the artwork pages. Fig-
EVALUATION: QUESTIONNAIRES AND ACTIVITY LOGS
To evaluate the effectiveness of the guide design, mainly with respect to the use of rich multimedia content and gesture based interaction, we set up a questionnaire and a system for automatically logging the user activity, as explained in Section 3. We have collected more than 100.000 records for the Nigra Sum guide and more than 20.000 records for the Nauman guide, each corresponding to an artwork, menu or catalog access, counting for more than 2.000 different visits. The questionnaires were submitted only during a limited period of the first exhibition. We collected 176 questionnaires filled by visitors aged between 12 and 78, with an average age of 43, of whom 40% were male and 60% female. A thorough discussion on the numerical results of the analysis is beyond the size of this paper: rather, we prefer to comment here three main questions about the user perception of the project goals and their appreciation of the guide design. We answer the questions by integrating the questionnaire and the log evidences. Most of the results come from the guide about the Ethiopian art exhibition due to larger content and bigger complexity. Did users appreciate rich multimedia content? This is a crucial question, since we shift from the dominant model based on audio content to a model based on rich mixed multimedia. The results of the user questionnaires show a comparable appreciation for content of different nature: 4.1 points— measured along a five-point Likert scale—for the artwork pages with text and images, 3.9 points for audio comments directly related to the artworks, and 4.1 points for video clips accessible from different contexts of the guide, mainly from the guide introductory sections. The interest for content of different nature is confirmed by the analysis of the user activity. In most cases users have accessed different types of multimedia items and have devoted significant portions of their time to them. Of course, such a result is a confirmation of the quality of the content itself besides its role in the guide. Is it worth to extend content access with paths different from
95
many cases the set of artworks hosted in a room. Also the catalog based access, offering the possibility to directly select information related to a specific artwork, is consistent with an approach to information related to the physical location of the user standing in front of a specific work of art. The logs display also a meaningful presence of different navigational paths, showing that a part of the users took advantage of information access by theme and by keyword. The questionnaires confirm the interest for the multiple perspectives offered to access the content; a significant part of users declared appreciation of the Section and Keyword access (i.e., respectively 69% and 66% of the users that filled in the questionnaire) with high satisfaction (i.e., respectively 4.0 and 4.1 points along a five-point Likert scale).
Cat.
Home
Sect.
Sect. List
Tags
Video
Maps
Art work
Which is the relation between the access to the guide content and the presence of a visitor in a specific room? This question is important in the framework of pervasive computing models, on which many proposals have been issued related to museums and cultural heritage applications. For constraints of the exhibition site, we had no localization system for relating the user logs with their presence in a specific room or in front of a specific artwork. Anyway, we feel the problem is relevant to understand how the physical layout and the conceptual organization of an exhibition are related. By analyzing the user logs we found different user behaviors. In the Nigra Sum exhibition, characterized by a large number of artworks located in few rooms and by a complex guide organization, we noticed that in a significant number of cases the visitors didn’t browse guide information related to the artwork displayed in the room they were visiting, but followed also different navigational paths. The Nauman exhibition was characterized by a small number of large installations, in most cases one for each room, and by a simpler guide with only two access paths to content: by catalog and by map; in this case it is possible, in many cases, to match the user navigational path with the physical path along the exhibition room. While the issue deserves further investigation, which is in progress, we express the opinion that the availability of multiple content access paths is a feature that allows a significant part of users to follow navigational paths different from the exhibition layout.
Map List
Figure 4: User paths between the Nigra Sum guide sections direct access to a specific artwork? For properly answering this question we considered the user paths across the different guide pages. In order to have a synthetic view of the users behavior, we divided the guide pages in homogeneous sets, depicted as labeled nodes in the graph of Figure 4; we counted the entering and exiting paths from a set to another, computed from the logged user activities. The result, related to first 600 visits of the Nigra Sum exhibition, is shown in Figure 4 as directed edges between the nodes. The width of each edge is proportional to the number of paths from a set to another, with the exception of the big arrow at the right of the figure, that was scaled to a half of its real size for readability. A part of the user paths are represented in gray also for readability. Arrows pointing to the nodes without a source node represent paths inside the same class of items, e.g., a sequence of artworks or of map details. It is worth to note that moving between artworks is obtained by flicking pages, an iPod standard gesture that has been consistently and frequently used even by visitors not used to this class of devices. Figure 4 reveals recurrent user behaviours: (1) the path most frequently accessed from the home page is the map, then the catalog, then the section index and the tag index; the order does not correspond to the layout of the home page menu, revealing a preference to spatial associations rather than to thematic associations between artworks; (2) the audiovisual presentations have been consulted independently from their location in the guide, revealing at least the curiosity of experiencing something more than a simple audio comment; (3) the partial catalogs associated to the exhibition sections have been scarcely used, while those associated to the exhibition rooms have been heavily used, confirming the preference for spatial association as noted above; (4) from the artworks pages, besides browsing sequentially the artworks, the users have returned often to the home page and to the room map, which can be considered as safe return points. Concluding, the experimental results show a clear preference of the users for accessing information through maps and for browsing artworks belonging to the same group, in
Acknowledgments Giuseppe Barbieri, Head of the Art History Department of Ca’ Foscari, has coordinated the whole project, assisted by Valeria Finocchi for the guide content preparation. Marek Maurizio has designed and implemented the CMS. The project has been supported by Banca Popolare Friuladria.
5.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Celentano, R. Orsini, F. Pittarello, G. Barbieri. Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Art Guide on iPod Touch. Interaction Design & Architecture(s), n. 5&6, 2009. [2] G. Barbieri, A. Celentano, R. Orsini, F. Pittarello. Understanding Art Exhibitions: From Audioguides To Multimedia Companions. DMS 2009, Int. Conf. on Distributed Multimedia Systems, Redwood City, USA, 2009. [3] A. Damala, H. Kockelkorn. A Taxonomy for the Evaluation of Mobile Museum Guides. In MobileHCI ’06, Helsinki, Finland, 2006. [4] A.M. Ronchi. eCulture : Cultural Content in the Digital Age, Springer, Berlin, 2009. [5] O. Stock, M. Zancanaro (eds.). PEACH: Intelligent Interfaces for Museum Visits, Springer, Berlin, 2007.
96
