Maria Vayanou

• MSc in Computer Science
• National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

In this article, we present the use-case of ArtStory Beats, a mobile application that aims to reflect the creative dialogue between visual arts and music, offering stories about the vibrant interactions that take place within the artistic communities over time. The app use is quite simple: it scans physical copies of visual artworks and provides au...

Contemporary visual artists often collaborate with musicians and composers to enrich their artworks and provide multisensory viewing experiences by leveraging the power of digital technology. In this paper, we present our approach to follow in their footsteps by creating a mobile application that provides “mixed-media interpretations” for a variety...

In comparison with a traditional museum, an “ecomuseum” is radically different: It is not housed in a building and does not have a collection of physical objects or artifacts. It aims to help visitors discover the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of a region through the identification of important points of interest (POIs), while offering...

Extensive research on mobile guides for museums has explored the potential of technology to offer some of the services that have been traditionally provided by human guides, including guiding visitors in the museum space, providing information about the exhibits, and using more advanced interpretative approaches such as digital storytelling and gam...

This work investigates how to digitally mediate perspective sharing and face-to-face conversations within groups of museum visitors. We use the case of a storytelling group game and explore the potential of mobile technology as a tool to facilitate perspective sharing activities. Using information asymmetry, a "Social Mediator" role is introduced:...

Digital storytelling has been extensively used in cultural heritage sites with the aim to construct knowledge about the past and promote its significance to the present. From the body of research and practical implementations that are concerned with hybrid forms of storytelling in cultural heritage sites, only a few systematically explore the inter...

Digital storytelling has been extensively used in cultural heritage sites with the aim to construct knowledge about the past and promote its significance to the present. From the body of research and practical implementations that are concerned with hybrid forms of storytelling in cultural heritage sites, only a few systematically explore the inter...

During the COVID 19 pandemic, cultural institutions were severely affected. To this end, they made an effort to enhance their online presence and online activity became the main way of approaching the public. Although the social aspects of a physical visit are well acknowledged and valued today, they nevertheless seemed to be largely neglected in t...

In this paper we present a field study that took place in the environment of the exhibition “Stefanos Rokos: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ No More Shall We Part, 14 paintings 17 years later”, hosted at the Benaki Museum (May 2019). A group of visitors played the game “Find the Artwork behind the Story!”, crafting stories over the displayed artworks an...

Visits to cultural heritage sites are generally social in nature, yet resources to support these sociable experiences are often individualized, catering to the solitary visitor. Digital technologies offer means to disrupt this predicament, encouraging social engagements in cultural contexts. Here we present the results of a user study that systemat...

Social interactions are a key objective in cultural experience design and museum games are often aimed to foster conversations between visitors. However, the participation of cultural creators is hardly explored. In this paper we examine how the artists may participate in storytelling games played over their artworks. We present a field study at a...

This paper describes the personalization challenges that are faced when designing a gameful experience for groups of visitors in a cultural site. We present our approach to account for different player paces between members of the same group, by introducing short, in-game activities. We discuss the relationships between player types, personality tr...

This paper explores the design of digitally mediated, gamified experiences in the environment of art exhibitions. We use the trajectories HCI framework for analysis and design, decomposing the overall experience in different levels. First, we develop a storytelling game that is meant to be experienced by ‘many’ visitors, leveraging a group gameplay...

In this paper, we present the results of a user study focusing on whether the visitors' cultural preferences and expectations relate to different personality traits as defined by the Big Five personality model. We describe the user study procedure and report the correlations discovered between some of the Big Five factors and the participant assess...

" Envisioning cultural institutions as "social places", where the visitors can "create, share, and connect to each other around the cultural heritage content" (as defined by Nina Simon), we explore how to design cultural group experiences that combine personal moments of reflection to social encounter. In previous work we proposed a storytelling ga...

In this article we explore how to play storytelling games with collections of artworks. First we propose a generic storytelling game, titled “Find the artwork behind the story!”, and we present the results of a user study that investigates the game’s affordances in different environments and setups, ranging from large exhibitions at a cultural cent...

Considering the virtual museum visit as a group activity, in this paper we explore how to support and facilitate social interactions between visitors in the 3D environment of an interactive virtual museum, while also accounting for isolated moments of personal engagement with the cultural content. Moving towards this direction, we present the desig...

In this paper we present a generic storytelling game, leveraging collections of artworks. We present the results of a user study that contains a series of game-testing sessions, accompanied by semi-structured group interviews and individual questionnaires. The game-testing sessions took place in several different physical environments, ranging from...

In this work, we propose MagicHOLO, a method to support engaging collaborative and collocated experiences through 3D projections using personal mobile devices in the physical space of a museum. The users of the MagicHOLO mobile app are prompted to coordinate in order to create a common communication network for their devices and to decide on the el...

The museum visit is a collaborative activity: people typically visit museums in social groups, and conversation between group members has been highlighted as a key aspect for an engaging visitor experience. In this work, we detail initial findings and experience results from the design and evaluation of a group-based digital storytelling journey, w...

In this work we report on a recent user study where 20 couples experienced in a laboratory setting an interactive, mobile-based, digital story for an archaeological site. We describe the design of the experience and analyze our approach with regard to a design framework that was recently proposed for collocated interaction in mobile experiences. We...

This paper reports on a small-scale experiment conducted in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (SMA), showcasing the effective use of CHESS research prototype for the creation and provision of personalized interactive museum experiences and highlighting the main results reached.

Digital storytelling is one resource museums have in hand for enriching their offer to audiences and society at large. But how is the museum to author digital storytelling experiences that cater to various needs while maintaining scientific integrity? In this paper, we report on a series of experiences involving the creation of several interactive...

CHESS is a research prototype system aimed at enriching museum visits through personalized interactive storytelling. Aspiring to replace traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with carefully-designed references to the exhibits, CHESS follows a plot-based approach, where the story authors create stories around...

In this work, we present the CHESS research prototype system which offers personalized, interactive digital storytelling experiences to enhance museum visits, demonstrating the authoring and visiting experiences.

Sets of 'personas' representing archetypical visitors of two very different museums, the Acropolis Museum in Greece and Cité de l'Espace in France, were defined and described as part of a multitude of user-centered design methods used to better understand the needs of visitors and develop for them a personalized mobile storytelling experience. Here...

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, in...

PAROS is a generic system under design whose goal is to offer personalization, recommendation, and other adaptation services to information providing systems. In its heart lies a rich user model able to capture several diverse aspects of user behavior, interests, preferences, and other attitudes. The user model is instantiated with profiles of user...

In this demonstration, we present a flexible system that enables the provision of personalized functionalities to digital libraries. The system has been developed based on the needs of The European Library portal and will be demonstrated in that particular context, but could be applied more generally. It implements a broad set of data processing, a...