Publications

One of the most popular audiences of museums is classroom-size groups of students, in the context of school field trips. However, students do not get adequate involvement during interactive group experiences, which might affect their impression and learning gained from the visit. In this paper, we present our findings from a recent study in middle schools, where 507 students were engaged with their class in a learning game about olive oil production. We had two players directly control the game and varied the level of involvement of the audience (the rest of the class), using iPads. We found that higher involvement in the game afforded greater retention of information after two days, while there was no difference after one day. Also, students with direct agency in the game revealed greater learning gains than the audience members. Results about the impact of socioeconomic status and social interactions on learning are reported, along with the most important design implications.

Considering the shift of museums towards digital experiences that can satiate the interests of their young audiences, we suggest an integrated schema for socially engaging large visitor groups. As a means to present our position we propose a framework for audience involvement with complex educational material, combining serious games and virtual environments along with a theory of contextual learning in museums. We describe the research methodology for validating our framework, including the description of a testbed application and results from existing studies with children in schools, summer camps, and a museum. Such findings serve both as evidence for the applicability of our position and as a guidepost for the direction we should move to foster richer social engagement of young crowds.

Museums are rich and complex learning experiences, using a variety of interactive approaches to engage their audiences. However, the largely unstructured nature of free-choice learning calls for alternative approaches that can effectively engage groups of school age students with diverse cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we present our findings from a recent study in a museum in Greece, where triads of stu-dents had to learn about olive oil production using a game enabling different levels of interactivity and collaboration. We found that facilitation by an expert guide led to greater learning gains as compared to students playing alone, with one or three simultaneous game controllers. We also com-pared these results with a previous controlled experiment conducted in the US with middle school students, using the same game but without the ecologically valid facilitation. Drawing ideas from sociocultural and cognitive theories we interpret the contradictory findings, identifying the impact of culture on their (social) interactions, their subjective game experience, and eventually learning, in these spaces.

One of the goals of much virtual reality (VR) research is to increase realism. In particular, many techniques for locomotion in VR attempt to approximate real-world walking. However, it is not yet fully understood how the design of more realistic locomotion techniques affects user task performance. We performed an experiment to compare a semi-natural locomotion technique (based on the Virtusphere device) with a traditional, non-natural technique (based on a game controller) and a fully natural technique (real walking). We found that the Virtusphere technique was significantly slower and less accurate than both of the other techniques. Based on this result and others in the literature, we speculate that locomotion techniques with moderate interaction fidelity will often have performance inferior to both high-fidelity techniques and well-designed low-fidelity techniques. We argue that our experimental results are an effect of interaction fidelity, and perform a detailed analysis of the fidelity of the three locomotion techniques to support this argument.

One of the limitations of most virtual reality (VR) systems is that users cannot physically walk through large virtual environments. Many solutions have been proposed to this problem, including locomotion devices such as the Virtusphere. Such devices allow the user to employ moderately natural walking motions without physically moving through space, but may actually be difficult to use at first due to a lack of interaction fidelity. We designed and evaluated a visual aid that shows a virtual representation of the sphere to the user during an acclimation phase, reasoning that this would help users understand the forces they were feeling, plan their movements, and better control their movements. In a user study, we evaluated participants’ walking performance both during and after an acclimation phase. Half of the participants used the visual aid during acclimation, while the other half had no visual aid. After acclimation, all participants performed more complex walking assessment tasks without any visual aid. The results demonstrate that use of the visual aid during acclimation was effective for improving task performance and decreasing perceived difficulty in the assessment tasks.

In informal learning spaces employing digital content, such as museums, visitors often do not get adequate exposure to content, or they passively receive instruction offered by a museum docent to the whole group. This research aims to identify which elements of co-located group collaboration, virtual environments, and serious games can be leveraged for an enhanced museum learning and entertaining experience. We developed C-OLiVE, an interactive virtual environment supporting tripartite group collaboration, which we used to explore our hypothesis that synchronous, co-located, group collaboration will afford greater learning compared to conventional approaches. In an empirical study, we found some evidence supporting this hypothesis, taking into consideration other factors such as game experience and social presence. Students participating in the three-player condition demonstrated a better understanding of the collaborative tasks compared to their single-player counterparts. We discuss these results and outline future studies using the same virtual environment.