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Within this paper, we propose an approach to visualize the flow of visitors through an exhibition in space and time with the goal to assist curators and other museum professionals in the crucial task of analyzing visitor experience at exhibitions in museums.
Detailed information about and deep insights into the preferences of visitors are crucial...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... diagrams belong to the category of flow diagrams and can visualize various kinds of sequences. In 1869 Charles Joseph Minard proved the possibilities to display multi-dimensional data within a Sankey-like diagram by visualizing Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812 (Friendly, 2002) as shown in figure 5. Nowadays Sankey diagrams are likely to be used to visualize flows of energy or materials in networks or processes (Riehmann, Hanfler, Froehlich, 2005). ...
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Citations
... Further studies explored visitors' perceptions of specific types of interactions, the role of interactivity in visitor experience, and visitor behavior analysis for designing interactions. Drawing from past studies, the researchers employed both qualitative and quantitative methods for the evaluation of visitor experiences for different purposes, such as: the perception of digital and physical reproductions and their effects on the museum learning [21] ; interface design evaluation [19] ; motivation and behavior study of online visitors [17 , 41] ; evaluation of visitor experience at onsite exhibitions by visualizing visitor flows; preferences in the physical spaces [44] ; usability evaluation of virtual tour applications by employing the System Usability Scale (SUS) 1 [27] ; multidisciplinary psychosomatic assessment for user experience design evaluation [6] . ...
... Further studies explored visitors' perceptions of specific types of interactions, the role of interactivity in visitor experience, and visitor behavior analysis for designing interactions. Drawing from past studies, the researchers employed both qualitative and quantitative methods for the evaluation of visitor experiences for different purposes, such as: the perception of digital and physical reproductions and their effects on the museum learning [21] ; interface design evaluation [19] ; motivation and behavior study of online visitors [17 , 41] ; evaluation of visitor experience at onsite exhibitions by visualizing visitor flows; preferences in the physical spaces [44] ; usability evaluation of virtual tour applications by employing the System Usability Scale (SUS) 1 [27] ; multidisciplinary psychosomatic assessment for user experience design evaluation [6] . ...
... Within science museums, data visualization has been used to augment engagement with the scientific ideas behind museum exhibits (Mallavarapu et al., 2019;Roberts and Lyons, 2020). Data visualization techniques have further been used to visualize visitor flow and other forms of exhibition engagement, framing data visualization as an analytical tool for museum workers (Strohmaier et al., 2015;Schettino, 2013) also to support the design of future exhibits (Gwilt et al., 2019). An interesting example of the use of data visualization as an underlying design aspect of a science museum exhibit is the interactive exhibit EMDialog, supporting exploration of an interactive presentation related to artist Emily Carr, which found the utility of supporting shared visitor group engagement and engaging with data visualization in multiple ways (Hinrichs et al., 2008). ...
Purpose
This paper aims to explore what design aspects can support data visualization literacy within science museums.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative study thematically analyzes video data of 11 visitor groups as they engage with reading and writing of data visualization through a science museum exhibition that features real-time and uncurated data.
Findings
Findings present how the design aspects of the exhibit led to identifying single data records, data patterns, mismeasurements and distribution rate.
Research limitations/implications
The findings preface how to study data visualization literacy learning in short museum interactions.
Practical implications
Practically, the findings point toward design implications for facilitating data visualization literacy in museum exhibits.
Originality/value
The originality of the study lays in the way the exhibit supports engagement with data visualization literacy with uncurated data records.
... For instance, Holdgaard (2012) revealed that older visitors are more interested in cultural heritage while younger visitors show a higher interest in natural history. Strohmaier, Sprung, Nischelwitzer and Schadenbauer (2015) suggest that visitor paths visualization can be an effective way to help museum professionals improve the design of experiences. Similarly, a plethora of studies discussed the relationship between visitor movements and visitor experiences (Yoshimura et al., 2014;Yoshimura, Sinatra, Krebs, & Ratti, 2019;Tsiropoulou, Thanou, & Papavassiliou, 2017). ...
Experiences always need to be designed with the visitor in mind. In our society, museums hold a prominent place for human learning and experiences. Museum experiences have become a sophisticated blend of spatial design, exhibit curation, and multimedia selection, shaping the overall physical context of the visitor's experience. Driven by the question of how we can create effective visitor learning experiences in contemporary museums, a large-scale mobile eye tracking was conducted. Mobile eye tracking has recently entered tourism research as a novel method to study visitor behaviour in real-life environments and in a non-intrusive manner. The findings reveal that the physical context greatly influences the museum learning experience, and show significant differences in attention and engagement levels across the exhibition's elements. The study adds insights into the relationship between visitors' museum learning processes and the physical context and contributes to the model of contextual learning. Practical implications for museum experience design are offered with regards to spatial experience design and different visitor age segments.
... In particular, localisation information is used to visualise users' movements in a virtual museum. In [43,44], the metrics popularity, attraction, holding power and flows have been investigated for their visualisation. These works focus on visualisation of data without exploring deep data-mining techniques and data-filtering, and focus on simple exhibit-to-exhibit transitions without tackling longer sequences as paths. ...
In increasingly hyper-connected societies, where individuals rely on short and fast online communications to consume information, museums face a significant survival challenge. Collaborations between scientists and museums suggest that the use of the technological framework known as Internet of Things (IoT) will be a key player in tackling this challenge. IoT can be used to gather and analyse visitor generated data, leading to data-driven insights that can fuel novel, adaptive and engaging museum experiences. We used an IoT implementation—a sensor network installed in the physical space of a museum—to look at how single visitors chose to enter and spend time in the different rooms of a curated exhibition. We collected a sparse, non-overlapping dataset of individual visits. Using various statistical analyses, we found that visitor attention span was very short. People visited five out of twenty rooms on average, and spent a median of two minutes in each room. However, the patterns of choice and time spent in rooms were not random. Indeed, they could be described in terms of a set of linearly separable visit patterns we obtained using principal component analysis. These results are encouraging for future interdisciplinary research that seeks to leverage IoT to get numerical proxies for people attention inside the museum, and use this information to fuel the next generation of possible museum interactions. Such interactions will based on rich, non-intrusive and diverse IoT driven conversation, dynamically tailored to visitors.
... Thus, many studies focus on the analysis of visitor interactions, flows, and the popularity of points of interest within buildings [8,12,18], fairs [14], festivals [15], and conferences [9]. For the case of monitoring and analyzing the behavior of visitors in a museum, the visualization of metrics such as popularity, attraction, holding power, and flows has been explored to support the work of museum staff [6,13]. Many studies have also utilized sensors to measure the behavioral patterns of museum visitors. ...
This paper reports our experience with crowd monitoring technologies in the challenging real-world conditions of a modern, open-space museum. We seized the opportunity to use the NEMO science center as a testbed, and studied the effectiveness of neighborhood discovery and density estimation algorithms in a network formed by visitors wearing bracelets emitting RF beacons. The diverse set of conditions (flash crowds in open spaces vs. single person booths) revealed three interesting findings: (i) state-of-the-art density estimation fails in 80% of the cases, (ii) RSS-based classi-fiers fail too, because their underlying assumptions do not hold in many scenarios, and (iii) neighborhood discovery can obtain exact information in an energy-efficient way, provided that static and mobile nodes are differentiated to filter out " passers by " clobbering the true popularity of an exhibit. The overall lesson from the experiment is that today's algorithms are quite far from the ideal of monitoring popularity in a privacy-preserving and energy-efficient way with minimal infrastructure across the set of heterogeneous conditions encountered in practice.
... Museum monitoring. For the case of monitoring and analyzing the behavior of visitors in a museum, the visualization of metrics such as popularity, attraction, holding power and flows has been explored to support the work of museum staff [56,84]. Many studies have also utilized sensors to measure the behavioral patterns of museum visitors. ...
... Once visitors mobility has been tracked, it is suitable for a number of applications. In the case of monitoring and analyzing the behavior of the visitors of a museum, visualization of metric such as popularity, attraction, holding power and flows has been explored with the purpose of supporting the museum staff [56,84]. In the case of city-wide events, crowd behavioral patterns such as crowd density and pedestrian flows can help the monitoring of the crowd by the institutions [67,95] as well as support the individual decision-making of the members of the crowd [5,96]. ...
Sensor networks can nowadays deliver 99.9% of their data with duty cycles below 1%. This remarkable performance is, however, dependent on some important underlying assumptions: low traffic rates, medium size densities and static nodes. In this thesis, we investigate the performance of these same resource-constrained devices, but under scenarios that present extreme conditions: high traffic rates, high densities and mobility: the so-called ExtremeWireless Sensor Networks (EWSNs).From a networking perspective, communicating in these extreme scenarios is very challenging. The combined effect of high network densities and dynamics makes the network’s characteristics fluctuate drastically both in space and time. Traditional mechanisms struggle to cope with these sudden changes, resulting in a continuous exchange of information that saturates the bandwidth and increases the energy consumption. Once this saturation threshold is reached, mechanisms take decisions based on wrong, outdated information and soon stop working. Even flexible mechanisms have difficulties adapting their settings to the fickly conditions of EWSNs and result in poor performance.To efficiently communicate in EWSNs, mechanisms must therefore comply to a set of requirements i. e., design principles, which are explained next. First, they need to be resilient to local and remote failures and operate as independent as possible from the status of other nodes (state-less principle). Second, because in EWSNs bandwidth is a scarce resource, it should be mainly used for the transmission of the actual data. Mechanisms should not be artificially orchestrated and should exploit each other in a cross-layer fashion to reduce as much as possible their communication overhead (opportunistic principle). Third, mechanisms should support extreme network conditions from their inception. Adapting traditional mechanisms, which are designed for milder conditions, would otherwise result in complex and fragile mechanisms (anti-fragile principle). Fourth, in the case the resources saturate, mechanisms should operate in a conservative fashion, so that performance degrades gracefully without drastic disruptions (robustness principle).Inspired by these four principles, this thesis detaches from traditional communication primitives – which are deterministic and based on rigid structures – and proposes a novel communication stack based on opportunistic anycast. According to this primitive, nodes communicate with the first available neighbor, independently of its location and identity. The more neighbors, themore efficient the communication.At the foundation of this communication stack lays SOFA, a medium access control (MAC) protocol that exploits opportunistic anycast to handle extreme densities in an efficient manner. Its implementation details are presented in Chapter 2. On top of the SOFA layer, this thesis builds two essential network services: neighborhood cardinality (density) estimation and data collection. The former service is provided by Estreme, a mechanism presented in Chapter 3, which exploits the rendezvous time of SOFA to estimate the number of neighbors with almost zero overhead. The latter service is provided by Staffetta in Chapter 4, a mechanism that adapts the wake-up frequency of nodes to bias the opportunistic neighbor-selection of SOFA towards the desired direction e. g., towards the sink node collecting all data.Finally, this thesis presents an extensive evaluation of a complete opportunistic stack on simulations, testbeds and a challenging real-world deployment in the form of the NEMO science museum in Amsterdam. Results show that opportunistic behavior can lead to mechanisms that are both lightweight and robust and, thus, are able to scale to EWSNs.
... Finally, similar work has also been done in the context of virtual environments to trace user behavior [35], where full localization information is used to visualize movements of users in a virtual museum. More recently, the visualization of metrics such as popularity, attraction, holding power and flows has been explored [36,37]. These works focus on visualization of the data without investigating deeper into data-mining techniques and data-filtering, and focus on simple exhibit-to-exhibit transitions without tackling longer sequences as paths (as in this paper). ...
Fine-arts museums design exhibitions to educate, inform and entertain visitors. Existing work leverages technology to engage, guide and interact with the visitors, neglecting the need of museum staff to understand the response of the visitors. Surveys and expensive observational studies are currently the only available data source to evaluate visitor behavior, with limits of scale and bias. In this paper, we explore the use of data provided by low-cost mobile and fixed proximity sensors to understand the behavior of museum visitors. We present visualizations of visitor behavior, and apply both clustering and prediction techniques to the collected data to show that group behavior can be identified and leveraged to support the work of museum staff.
... Moreover, this strategy may also contribute to manage the tourist flows. According to Sthromaier et al. [5], receiving information about the preferences of visitors monitoring visitor paths and trends is crucial to improve the visitor experience of museum or cultural site. Having the chance to lead unknowingly the tourists towards an area rather than another one, could allow an improved distribution of tourists in a site, avoiding too much crowded or too neglected areas. ...
In the last decade, with the widespread of interactive systems, a large number of multimedia contents have been added to the traditional fruition systems (e.g. information panels, audio guides) of museums and archaeological areas to enrich the experience of the cultural assets. Among the most attractive there is the use of: projection screens, virtual interaction systems or acoustic informative materials. The installation of acoustic informative materials in archaeological areas should aim to improve the soundscape quality in order to increase the visiting pleasantness by the tourists. Nevertheless, their use might help to enhance archaeological areas by properly managing the visitor flows (avoiding congested noisy areas and unattractive quiet areas). An example is the installation of sonic architectures, that are speaker systems hidden within sound design objects harmoniously blended in the environment. This work aims to verify the possibility to use sonic architectures to manage visitors' flows. The investigation has been conducted in an immersive virtual reality environment, where it was recreated a site of the ancient Pompeii, the Quadriporticus.
