=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1352/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=Virtual, Remote Participation in Museum Visits by Older Adults: A Feasibility Study
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1352/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-1352
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iui/KostoskaBDC15
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==Virtual, Remote Participation in Museum Visits by Older Adults: A Feasibility Study==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1352/paper2.pdf
Virtual, Remote Participation in Museum Visits
by Older Adults: A Feasibility Study
Galena Kostoska, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel and Fabio Casati
University of Trento
Via Sommarive 9, 38123 Povo (TN), Italy
{kostoska,baez,daniel,casati}@disi.unitn.it
ABSTRACT Judge et al. [5] found that families in particular enjoy shar-
The goal of this paper is to understand if older adults can par- ing extended moments of time which are not easily captured
ticipate in remote museum visits with virtual environments, only with photos. Although photos and videos can be shared
and which design factors would be crucial for remote partic- immediately after an event, this event has passed and leaves
ipation system success. We report on a study with 30 older no opportunity for the remote participant to actively take part
adult participants, identifying strong and weak points of dif- in it [6]. Further, they found that children/grandchildren are
ferent designs for remote participation and identifying future mainly sharers of information and parents/grandparents are
design directions. Our results illustrate that different designs the receivers of information. In order to actually share infor-
can change communication dynamics, exploration and navi- mation, people typically use a combination of technologies
gation patterns, and we describe the design features that led to such as telephones, email, messengers, and video conferenc-
this. An interaction-free design was found to be the easiest to ing [9]. People almost always choose the technology that is
use, while virtual environments are perceived as aesthetically both easy for them to use and likely to allow them to reach
appealing. Implications for developers are discussed. their social contacts.
Some studies [10, 3] show that older adults can overcome so-
Author Keywords cial and spatial barriers with the help of ICT. Winstead et al.
Older adults; museums; remote participation; feasibility; [10] reports on qualitative studies where older adults from as-
sisted living communities used technology like Google Maps
ACM Classification Keywords with Street View and virtual tours of cultural institutions, al-
H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): lowing them to stay connected with the places of sentimental
Miscellaneous value or to “visit” places of interest that are no longer acces-
sible to them. These online visits resulted in lower levels of
loneliness and social isolation.
INTRODUCTION
Physical isolation, lack of transportation as well as health de- Our work specifically focuses on remote participation in mu-
clines can limit older adults’ ability to travel [10, 3]. They seum visits, informed by previous research on social museum
typically want to participate in family events, such birthday experiences for remote visitors [1, 4]. Studies with remote
parties, weddings, or in everyday family events, but they may participants have shown that social interaction with compan-
be physically stopped in doing so [6, 5]. One way to deal with ion(s) while co-visiting can directly influence the remote vis-
this challenge is to provide for remote participation with the itor’s museum experience. Awareness of other visitors’ en-
help of online, virtual environments. gagement with the exhibits as well as direct interaction with
each other are however still overlooked. Our work advances
Previous research has investigated the use of technology to previous works by specifically investigating how we can im-
support communication between remote friends or family prove these two aspects.
members in different contexts: reading books [8], connect-
ing families [5, 6], watching TV and attending family events With this motivation, our research question is: are older
or parties [2]. The use of shared media in this context usually adults able to participate in remote museum visits though vir-
aims to go beyond simply conversing and to actually make tual environments? As a first step in this direction, we ex-
the remote particpants part of everyday episodes of life [6]. plored dyadic (two member) remote visits to museums, in
which one member is in the museum and the older adult is
at home. We explore different aspects of a museum visit and
analyse whether and how we can (1) design for navigating
and “visiting” museums from home, (2) design to strengthen
social group awareness, and (3) foster social interactions be-
tween people and improve their communication. We aim to
understand the design space of interfaces for museum visits
for older adults (specifically focusing on tablets) and to assess
Copyright held by the authors.
the respective suitability for remote participation in terms of Participants
ability to understand, follow and engage in virtual visits. We recruited 30 older adult participants for this study: 16 in
a care home (CH) and 14 participants in a daily centre (DC).
STUDY SETTING The participants were 4 men and 26 women whose age range
In order to answer our research question, we developed three was 70-93. The participants reported no prior use of technol-
versions of a remote participation system with different levels ogy, with only few participants reporting use of cell phones
of complexity and examined the following three hypothesis for communication with their relatives. Almost all of them
(for each of the prototypes): had a high school degree as the highest level of education,
except for one participant that held a Bachelor’s degree. The
H1 Participants are able to understand the presented museum DC group consisted of mostly healthy participants: 2 people
content reported hearing problems and 1 participant sight problems.
H2 Participants are able to follow the virtual museum tour The CH group consisted of frail adults: 12 out of 16 had mo-
H3 Participants are able to engage in contextual conversation bility problems, and 1 had hearing problems. For the CH
around presented exhibits participants we also got results from their Folstein test, a 30-
point questionnaire that is used to screen for cognitive impair-
Interface Designs ment: three of our participants scored below 24, which clas-
We took into account the difficulties in adopting and using sifies them as people with moderate cognitive impairment.
new technologies by older adults identified with prior trials
of the software [7], and we designed an interface that is based
Procedure
on familiarity: we translated a familiar interaction metaphor,
the book, into a software interface. In order to make sure We performed a within-subjects design, where the same sub-
participants always felt comfortable while using the software, jects were presented with all of the three interfaces. The order
we also implemented an always-on audio channel, which is of presentation of the interfaces was randomized. For each
very natural to them and allows them to engage in discussions participant, we conducted a field visit (from 30 to 45 mins
on the exhibits. The implementation was based on an iPad, each). The study was conducted in the natural household of
given its general high acceptance by older adults as a device. the participant (the care home or daily centre respectively).
Each field session was conducted by two researchers, one on-
For the purpose of the experiment we took into account the site and one remote. The onsite researcher introduced the pur-
following design aspects: (1) visual metaphor that represents pose of the visit and explained the designs and the interaction
visit: book (focuses on artefacts and content, the user jumps gestures (for the interactive interfaces). For the interaction-
from artefact to artefact) vs. virtual tour (focuses on space, free and interactive design, the position of the remote col-
the user navigates virtual representation of the museum); (2) laborator could be understood from the position of a photo
interaction paradigm: interaction-free navigation (the onsite bookmark in the book (the photo bookmark indicates the po-
member is a “guide” in the tour) vs. interactive navigation sition of the guide, if the guide is ahead, the bookmark is on
(the older adult navigates freely as well as can decide to fol- the left page of the book, if the guide is behind, the bookmark
low onsite member in the visit); and (3) social interaction: we is on the right page); the virtual tour design allowed its users
supported it with an audio channel. to freely “walk” inside the museum.
We presented our participants three interfaces: Of the 30 participants, 2 preferred not to use the virtual tour
design due to sight problems, and 4 did not wish to complete
• Interaction-free, guided tour (F): the participant is led
the questionnaire part of the study. The personal opinions of
by the onsite member in the visit, using a book visual
the participants were discussed with a semi-structured inter-
metaphor;
views at the end of the session. We asked them to discuss the
• Interactive, guided tour (I): the participant either follows problems that they encountered and to share their opinions
the onsite visitor or explores the content on her own, using about the visit.
a book visual metaphor; and
Data Collection
• Interactive, virtual reality tour (V): the participant freely
navigates in a 3D museum using the 3D Gallery app1 , a free We used a pre-defined observation list for each design and a
app for iPad that provides a small set of simple movements questionnaire after the use of all interfaces. For each hypoth-
for exploring 3D galleries. esis we collected the following information, in order to assess
them.
To study a realistic museum setting, a museum that our par-
ticipants would actually visit, we created a small museum of H1: We wanted to understand if participants were indeed un-
old crafts. The exhibition covered extinct crafts from the pre- derstanding the presented material, or whether they were just
vious century, a topic suggested by a phycologist working in blindly participating in the experiment without actually un-
a care home as interesting for the participants. The materials derstanding the purpose of it. Some minutes after the be-
for the museum were carefully selected with the help of the ginnings of the experiment, the remote collaborator therefore
phycologist. asked participants to name the presented craft and the onsite
collaborator carefully marked the participants’ answers. This
1
http://goo.gl/dVNjej task did not require them to remember the name of the piece
(a) Are people able to name (b) Are people able to find the (c) Are people able to follow (d) Are people able to engage in
crafts correctly? position of the guide? the guide? contextual conversation
Count
Interaction- Interactive Virtual reality Interactive Virtual reality Interactive Virtual reality Interaction- Interactive Virtual reality
free tour tour tour tour tour tour tour free tour tour tour
Figure 1. Data collected for the three interaction designs for remote museum participation by older adults (red bars correspond to “yes”, blue ones to
“no”). For questions (b) and (c), no data was collected regarding the interaction-free design, as participation did not require any system interaction.
of artwork, but to name the artwork that is observed at the move forward, but did not understand how many pages to go
moment. ahead in order to arrive to the position of the collaborator. The
observed difficulties appeared mainly in the group of partic-
H2: In order to understand whether participants were able ipants coming from the care home, which was characterized
to properly follow the tour, after 15 minutes of free explo- by a higher cognitive decline.
ration the remote collaborator asked the participants to reach
his position in the museum; the onsite collaborator observed The virtual reality visit presented even more difficulties, and
the performed action. Next, the remote collaborator moved to we reject the hypothesis: only 3 participants were able to find
another position, asking the participant to follow him (“walk” the position of the collaborator and to actually follow him in
with him). The performed action was again carefully marked the visit (Figure 1(b) and (c)). Additional t-tests confirm a
by the onsite collaborator. statistically significant advantage for the interactive tour for
the task of finding the position of the collaborator (t(58) =
H3: We observed if participants engaged in contextual con- 3.69, p < 0.01) as well as for the task of following the collab-
versations by observing whether they used the available audio
orator in the visit (t(58) = 3.39, p < 0.01).
channel or not for discussions around exhibits.
FINDINGS H3: Participants are able to engage in contextual conver-
Findings are organised according to our three hypotheses out- sation around presented exhibits
lined before. The hypothesis is accepted across the three designs, with the
virtual reality visit having a slightly smaller number of peo-
H1: Participants are able to understand the presented mu- ple engaging in contextual conversation due to 3D navigation
seum content problems. Once assisted by the collaborator, the participants
We accept this hypothesis for the three designs: the results engaged further in discussing the objects (Figure 1(d)). The
showed that 25 participants in the interaction-free design, 24 one-way ANOVA analysis shows that there was no statisti-
in the interactive guided tour, and 22 in the virtual tour, were cally significant difference in engagement between the differ-
able to name the craft that they are seeing, answering upon the ent interfaces (F(2,87) = 0.55, p = 0.57).
questions of the remote collaborator about the presented craft
(Figure 1(a)). There was no statistically significant difference PARTICIPANT’S EXPERIENCE AND DISCUSSION
between the different designs in terms of understanding the Most of our participants found the presented content inter-
tour as determined by a one-way ANOVA (F(2,87) = 0.46, p esting, they were really happy to speak about the old crafts,
= 0.63) especially for the ones they were familiar with. Typically, an
exploration of an exhibit started by highlighting what is pre-
H2: Participants are able to follow the virtual museum sented by both the participant and the remote researcher, con-
tour tributing information about the exhibit such as a description
For the interaction-free design we accept the hypothesis, of the craft presented or information related to the exhibit (for
since participants were able to name the craft correctly (H1) instance where the photo was taken). The initiator of the con-
and did not have to interact with the system to follow the versation was mainly the participant, reacting to the recogni-
guide. For the interactive guided tour, we reject the hypoth- tion of the presented content, for instance: “Ah, my brother in
esis, although we note that participants had a partial success law used to be a shoemaker”. Some of the participants were
in achieving it: 15 participants were able to find the position craftsman in the past and they also shared personal emotional
of the collaborator (Figure 1(b)), however only 14 were able stories with the remote collaborator. Content associated with
to follow, out of 30 (Figure 1(c)). This design presented their past resulted in vivid, and sometimes funny conversa-
some difficulties: participants understood that they should tions. We observed that an affective and emotional rather than
a scholar approach to the content was creating stronger im- gests that the social context should be a first aspect to focus on
pressions in our participants. Fiorenza, 84-years old female when designing more engaging experiences for older adults
participant, commented: “I used to be a tailor, this experiment from remote. The interaction-free paradigm was found the
was a really nice reminder, a great initiative.” most suitable interaction paradigm, the virtual reality tour de-
sign the most aesthetically appealing. While all participants
The post-use questionnaire results pointed to several impor- were able to understand the tours in our experimental setting,
tant considerations for design of interfaces for remote visiting we will next study the performance in an actual museum visit
systems and leisure technologies in general. (adding complexity also to the guide in the museum). In our
First, most users liked the audio channel. People particularly future work we will also explore additional mechanisms to
liked the guided tours, we understood that visiting museums design for curiosity and exploration.
in a company was a strong social motivator. In the post-use
questionnaire we asked our participants specifically whether ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
they preferred reading on their own or to follow another per- We thank the care home “Tobliners” in Malcesine, Italy,
son in the visit. Almost half of the participants preferred to the daily center for older adults “Centro Verde” (coopera-
follow another person in the visit, 10 preferred a mix of both, tive Sad) in Trento, Italy, as well as Olimpia Casciata, Da-
but none of them preferred to visit alone. Given that the older vide Simonini and Juan Jara who helped us with this study.
adults are often alone in the daily setting, we identify a good The work has been partially sponsored by the TrentoRise
potential for engagement and active participation in remote project PerTe. This work was also partly supported by the
companionship with beloved ones to increase their participa- project “Evaluation and enhancement of social, economic and
tion and satisfaction. emotional wellbeing of older adult” under the agreement no.
14.Z50.310029, Tomsk Polytechnic University.
Second, older adults aesthetically preferred 3D environments
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