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Smart venues

Venues, such as museums or cultural heritage sites, face multiple challenges: the need to adapt the offered experience to the individual visitor, the need to attract fresh and non-typical audiences, and the need to stimulate visitor engagement, collaboration and reflection.

This line of my research focuses on the development of applications for smart connected venues, delivered through mobile devices and with the goal of increasing the visitors’ overall Quality of Experience. I work with museums, connected cultural spaces and recently connected cities.

The technologies I use include social network gaming, to extract visitor personality and topic preferences, and cognitive-style based storytelling, to adapt the exhibit descriptions to the visitor’s personal way of processing information. Lately, and in view of the CROSSCULT project, I have started examining crowd sense-making and deliberation techniques. 

Related Publications

Museum Personalization Based on Gaming and Cognitive Styles: The BLUE Experiment

Naudet Y., Antoniou A., Lykourentzou I., Tobias E., Rompa J., Lepouras G., (2015), International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, Special Issue on Social Media and Networks for Multimedia Content Management, 7(2), 1-29.

This paper discusses the results of the BLUE experiment, which was implemented to examine the effect of personalization on museum visitor experience and took place in the Hellenic Cosmos of the Foundation of Hellenic World (FHW) technology museum. Visitors were provided with a mobile guide, implementing a personalization system that used their cognitive style, visiting style, and museum interests to recommend sequences of interesting exhibits and enhance their overall Quality of Experience (QoE) within the museum. The paper concludes with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the experiment, offering first conclusions and perspectives on the approach.

User Profiling: Towards a Facebook Game that Reveals Cognitive Style

Antoniou A., Lykourentzou I., Rompa J., Tobias E., Lepouras G., Vassilakis C., Naudet Y. (2013), in De Gloria A. (Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Games and Learning Alliance, LNCS 8605, 349-353, Springer International Publishing.

This work  presents an innovative approach based on social-network gaming to extract the players’ cognitive styles. Cognitive style describes the way individuals think, perceive and remember information, and it can be exploited  for personalization purposes. Questionnaires are usually employed to identify cognitive style, a tedious process for most users. Contrary to this, our approach relies on a Facebook game to discover the user's cognitive style and then uses this profile information for  enhancing their forthcoming visit in the museum. The game aims to help museums attract new visitors and support their user profiling processes.

Software

My Museum Guide

My Museum Guide (MMG) is an Android mobile application providing personalized exhibit descriptions and exhibit recommendations based on the cognitive profile of museum visitors. MMG also offers notifications for interesting activities that the visitor can do inside the museum and prompts them to capture and share their experience in the form of a personal diary through social networks. The application was developed in collaboration with the team at LIST in the context of the Experimedia BLUE project.  
​Copyright: LIST

My Museum Story

My Museum Story (MMS) is a Facebook game, designed in collaboration with the team at LIST and colleagues from UOP, to extract a user's cognitive style and their museum-specific preferences, prior to their actual visit to a specific museum. The game takes the user to a journey through a virtual museum, where after choosing an initial setup (museum layout, tools, and accompanying avatar) they can wander their virtual creation, filling empty podia with exhibitions that they win by playing mini-games. The game choices at the beginning of the game give rise to the user's MBTI cognitive profile. The exhibits the user selects to fill their virtual museum allow us to extract feature attributes related to their preferences in the actual museum. Finally the game taps into the power of social networks, allowing users to share their exhibits and invite friends to join their virtual adventure. 
​Copyright: UOP/LIST

Related Projects

Experimedia BLUE
​Funding: FP7, European Commission

CROSSCULT-Empowering reuse of digital cultural heritage in context-aware crosscuts of European history
​Funding:H2020, European Commission