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Zsófia Ruttkay: ColourMirror - Connecting Visitors with Exhibits by an Interactive
Installation In: Singh, D., Sieck, J., Muyingi, H.N.-N., Winschiers-Theophilus, H.,
Peters, A., Nggada, S. (Eds.) Digitisation of Culture: Namibian and International
Perspectives, Springer nature Singapore 2018 ISBN: 978-981-10-7697-8 pp. 305-321.
Colour Mirror – Connecting Visitors with Exhibits by
an Interactive Installation
Zsófia Ruttkay
Tech Lab, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest,
Bertalan Lajos utca 2, H–1111 Budapest, Hungary
ruttkay@mome.hu
Abstract. Museums are in transformation, along with today’s rapidly changing
society. Digital technologies not only attract the young generations as potential
visitors, but they also create entirely new ways of interpretation, engagement and
outreach. As a case study, we introduce our ColourMirror, a multi-functional
digital installation accompanying a museum exhibition in which objects are
arranged by colour. In a “magical” mirror visitors get to see the exhibit that
resembles their own colours the most. They may forward and distribute the image
in the mirror. The collected data is the basis of animated visualizations. An
empirical study of usage and visitor experience reveals that visitors enjoy the
interaction, remember well and identify with the object they have been assigned,
and feel motivated by digital installations to visit an exhibition. We sum up major
lessons and potential further applications.
Keywords: Digital museum, interactive installation, evaluation, Hungarian
method.
1 Introduction
In the age of the Information Technology revolution we witness not only the
proliferation of digital assets and online services in daily life, but also profound
challenges to the traditional forms of cultural heritage preservation and the institutions
dedicated to it [5]. In particular, museums are in transition, from being the “temple” of
knowledge and cultural assets to a forum where the tangible and intangible heritage
triggers conversations between the past and present, between the museum and its
visitors, and also among the individual visitors [3, 6, 7]. The visitor is no longer
considered a consumer, but a participant, on a number of different levels [11, 16, 19].
Digital technologies offer an arsenal of possibilities to liven up exhibitions, to trigger
visitors’ curiosity and get them involved, and to reach out beyond the walls to increase
impact and to attract new audiences. Museums are starting to harvest the opportunities.
For earliest examples, see [8, 12], for recent developments, check out the annual
conferences
1
. Still do not exist enough studies of the benefits of digital installations,
apart from their entertainment value for (young) visitors. Do they also learn, do they
become more interested in cultural heritage, do they come to value museums more? We
firmly believe that well-designed digital installations can serve all these purposes. One
must be aware that the introduction of technology merely for its own sake may even
work against the basic objectives of museums, e.g. if people come to play with new
technologies, without focusing on the exhibits and confronting their key messages, or
if an installation appears too “childish” to certain types of visitors who, thus, feel
excluded. However, the essence of good design is hard to figure out and formulate
because of the diversity of content and messages in different museums, the lack of
settled methodology of measuring success in the aforementioned dimensions, and
because several factors play a role in the evaluation of an installation, such as the design
of the UI and UX, the quality and quantity of the content, and the spatial and logical
integration of the installation into the structures of the exhibition. Thus a detailed
account of the design and usage of an installation helps to establish a new,
interdisciplinary field, and nuance the picture about the potentials of digital
technologies in museums. The lessons are relevant for all major players: the creative
and the computer scientists involved, and the staff of the museum. The Clevland
Museum of Art’s detailed follow-up report and conscious strategy for re-design is an
example in this respect [2].
In our TechLab, we have been designing, implementing and – occasionally –
evaluating installations for leading museums in Hungary
2
. We have been working with
a dozen partner museums both in the framework of our interdisciplinary Digital
Museum courses
3
and through commissioned works prepared for exhibitions. In both
settings, we are motivated to support the message of an exhibition, the – explicit or
implicit – needs of the visitors of all kinds, and last but not least, to comply with the
aesthetics of the physical space and the topic of the exhibition, by hiding, as much as
possible, the electronic components.
In this paper, after exploring the above-mentioned challenges in more detail, we
discuss one of our most recent and most complex museum installations as a case study.
The ColourMirror is a multi-functional digital installation with three components,
accompanying an exhibition where objects are arranged by their dominant colour. We
discuss the experience and the working of the “magical” mirror, where visitors get to
see an exhibit next to their own image. They may send and distribute this special
“selfie”. The collected data is visualized in several ways, giving insight into the objects
and colours recalled by prior visitors.
We report on an exploratory empirical study of usage and visitor experience and
discuss its results. We also reflect on the museum staff’s reaction to this unusual item.
We finish the article by outlining further work and application potentials that have a
broader relevance.
1
Museum and the Web: https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/ Museum Next international
conferences: https://www.museumnext.com/
2
For information and videos on a list of our museum projects, see http://techlab.mome.hu
3
See http://techlab.mome.hu/dimu
1.1 Museums and their new audiences
The communication, learning and leisure habits of the generations growing up with
internet and mobile devices have changed drastically [10, 17]. These potential future
visitors of museums may be characterized by the following features:
a preference for (audio)visual materials over text,
fast and parallel processing of (small) chunks of information,
a need for activity,
a preference for discussion and self-expression instead of authoritative
(academic) statements,
living online, connected, all the time,
a masterly handling of digital devices and services.
For these generations, the traditional 19th-century setting and protocols of museums are
not appealing. This is strikingly visible from the result of an inquiry in which university
students in art and design were asked to write down the first three words that came to
their mind about a museum (see Figure 1).
But behind many of the issues raised here there are – and in fact, there have been for
quite some time – inherent problems that may become more articulated with the
increase in visitor numbers and diversity. The following phenomena will be familiar
both to visitors and to museum staff:
The so-called “museum fatigue”, caused not only by the difficulty of orienting
oneself and by the distances and stairs to be walked (typical in traditional
museums), but by the overwhelming amount of exhibits.
People spend little time examining individual exhibits: they take a quick
photo, a selfie (if allowed), they are in a hurry “to see everything”, or wonder
around as they do not receive enough clues to explore the exhibition and make
sense of it for themselves [18].
Visitors are reluctant to read the textual information offered, both the “object
descriptions” which are professional and of identical nature for each object,
and the lengthier introduction at the beginning.
There is a limited availability of affordable souvenirs to take home and give
away, to recall the visit, typically constituting magnets, note-books and small
office utensils.
Once visitors have seen an exhibition, they receive no means of remaining in
touch, they are not motivated to do so, nor to return and to consider the (future
of) the museum as a matter of personal concern.
Fig. 1. Words associated with the museum by university students.
1.2 Potential uses of digital technologies in museums
Digital technologies can be exploited both to serve the needs of the new generation of
visitors and to remedy – one or more - anomalies of the museum visit. We emphasize
that even without any digital device it is possible to reach several goals. For instance,
an experienced museum guide can orient, inform, keep interest alive, adjust the depth,
length and wording of his/her explanation to suit individual visitors, and challenge them
to give their own opinion. But there are far more visitors than guides, so digital devices
and solutions can take over several of these functions. Different types of applications
such as multimedia guides, quizzes and touch-screen based explanations are finding a
place in museums.
It is more exciting to invent entirely new, poetic or “magical” experiences that would
not be possible without a digital arsenal. These novel experiences – often involving
emotions, the joy of bodily movement or cooperation between visitors – should not
distract attention from the artefacts, but just the opposite; and they should underline the
main message of the exhibition. We are especially motivated to invent such unique
applications.
Before discussing one example in detail, we sum up the possible functions and forms
of digital applications in an exhibition:
1. Helping to find one’s way in an exhibition, localising objects or topics and
offering paths tailored for individual interest – by audio or multimedia
guides, where the path may be tailored to the individual visitors (e.g.
offering a list of top attractions, suggesting topics to suit age, gender or
cultural characteristics – not to mention the choice of languages).
2. Helping to investigate and understand individual exhibits – by showing
hidden parts or layers, (visually) explaining the mechanism behind, the
creation or the usage, by putting the visitor in charge through “learning by
doing”.
3. Helping to explore the context of a single exhibit, for example by providing
layered information about its provenance and/or its historic or artistic
context, or by presenting a (virtual) collection of similar artefacts, even
from other collections and countries.
4. Facilitating active learning – by quizzes or single or multi-player games.
5. Enabling a playful physical activity, also in order to break the monotony of
the visit.
6. Facilitating remembering and creative re-use – by enabling visitors to take
(special) photos and share them instantly, by offering access to high-
resolution photos of the exhibits online, possibly accompanied by further
background information.
7. Making the visitor identify emotionally with the topic, protagonists and
stories in an exhibition – the means for which may vary from controlling
motion, bringing to life the “heroes” of an exhibition or taking decisions
on their behalf, or following a story from the point of view of any particular
character. The general atmosphere, realistic or abstract sound and light
installations may also induce emotions.
8. Urging the visitors to form and voice their own opinion – by taking
decisions and voting as part of the exhibition visit, with witty physical or
virtual instruments fulfilling the role of a query or a guest book.
9. Inducing discussion between visitors – multi-user and spacious
installations with a role for onlookers can also fulfil this function.
10. Reaching out to potential visitors – by placing a catchy installation at the
entrance of the exhibition, or outside of the museum building.
11. Getting visitors involved – by asking them for contribution to an exhibition
or a collection with own objects, stories, creative ideas or pieces.
Space does not allow for a detailed discussion of the above functionalities (nor some
others); but see further [4]. We will reflect on these functions in connection with our
application in the final discussion.
2 The ColourMirror
The ColourMirror is an interactive digital installation that was created for the exhibition
‘In the Mood for Colours’ at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest
4
. This exhibition,
which was the last one before the museum closed for several years of renovations in
Fall 2017, was based on an unusual curatorial concept, presenting almost 400 artefacts
(glass, ceramics, textiles, furniture) arranged according to their most dominant colour,
in three rooms — Red, Green, and Blue.
The museum asked the interdisciplinary team of MOME TechLab to create an
engaging and playful installation which would prepare visitors for the colour-centred
exhibition, before they entered the exhibition rooms. They gave complete freedom to
4
http://szintukor.imm.hu/en/
the design team; the only constraining factor was the physical space available. After
exploring different ideas that would allow visitors to experiment with R-G-B colours
or to explore the linguistic expression and the emotional and symbolic connotations of
colours, the museum staff chose for a transmedial interactive application to bring the
exhibits into focus in a playful way.
The very basic idea of our installation is similar to the one of the Make a Face!
application, where the visitors recalls a portrait from the collection which is similar to
his/her facial expression [1]. In [15] the authors present a “digital souvenir”, a photo
compiled of the image of the visitor and the exhibit he/she spent the most time with.
We also exploited a similar idea of a digital souvenir.
2.1 The three functions
The ColourMirror is placed in a separate room with two doors opening to a corridor,
which visitors pass through before they enter the exhibition. In the corridor a short
text in Hungarian and in English explains the installation and invites visitors to give it
a try. (Initially, we provided no other written instructions in the room, neither printed
nor displayed.)
Besides creating an engaging interactive installation, we also wanted to reflect on
the visitors data and to offer them a digital souvenir as a reminder of their experience,
and of the exhibition. We created an installation consisting of three units, on three sides
of the room, serving the following functions:
1. When entering the room, the visitor is faced with a mirror-like interactive
installation that responds to the visitor by displaying one of the exhibits.
2. On the side wall, as visitors move forward in the room, animated data
visualizations may be observed on large displays.
3. Next to the exit there is a touch-screen from which visitors can send off an e-
mail with their own “mirror image” that also shows the object that was
assigned to them.
2.2 Mirroring the visitor with the object that matches him/her the best
In the darkened room, there is an installation resembling a full-length dress mirror.
Behind this semi-transparent mirror there stands a display of the same size, and at the
bottom of the mirror there is a hidden Kinect camera. At first, the mirror shows a
dazzling mixture of moving colours in order to catch the eye of the visitor. When the
visitor stands still in front of the mirror, (s)he is scanned by the camera. The few
seconds of this scanning process are indicated visually in the mirror, after which there
appears an exhibit in the upper right-hand corner of the mirror next to the silhouette of
the visitor, which is filled with stripes representing proportionally the six dominant
colours that result from an analysis of his/her captured silhouette image. A one-sentence
explanation (also in two languages) states that the object is the exhibit that is the most
similar in colour to those of the visitors (see Figure 2).
Fig. 2. A visitor in front of the ColourMirror.
When a visitor enters, stands still or leaves, this is perceived by processing the amount
of movement (the number of changing pixels) in a dedicated capture area in front of the
mirror. The silhouette of the person is extracted through depth analysis of
the 3D image taken by the Kinect camera. The colour photo of the visitor is processed
in a similar way as the object photos (see below).
The visitor is offered the artefact from the collection of exhibits that matches his/her
colours the best. The implicit DB query of the artefacts is based on pre-processed
information about the colours of each artefact in the DB. For each object, there is also
a good-quality photo available, in 3x8 bit colour representation and with the
background removed. In order to reduce the number of colours for fast query purposes,
we reduced the number of colours for each object to six by standard colour quantization
[9]. In all computations we used CIELab representation, which is more suited to model
the human perception of colour similarity. For computing the similarity of individual
colours, we used the CIE94 measure [14]. For each object, next to the full-colour photo,
we also stored the six reduced colours and the percentage of the presence of each of
these in the entire image. Hence a colour palette, consisting of six colours and six
percentages, was obtained for each artefact and stored in the DB. From the scanned
image of the visitor, a colour palette was obtained each time in a similar way.
The best match for the visitor’s palette was obtained by the following steps:
1. The correspondence of the colour palette of the visitor with that of the k-th
object was characterised by a number hk for each of the objects in the database:
a. Using the CIE94 measure, the colour distance cij of each of the 36
pairs (6 in the colour palette of the visitor paired with 6 in that of the
object) was quantified.
b. Indicating by pi and pj the percentages in the colour palette of the
visitor and in the that of the object, respectively, a representative
distance rij of the colour pairs was computed by taking into account
the occurrence of the two colours:
rij = cij * min (pi/pj, pj/pi).
c. Then, by taking into account the rij numbers for the 36 pairs of colours
between the two palettes, we picked the “best match” – that is, the
best pairing of the 6 colours in the object and the visitor – by using
the Hungarian Method algorithm [13], which provided the number
hk.
2. From all the objects, the one with the lowest hk value was selected as the best
match and shown in full colour on the display of the mirror.
2.3 Sharing the mirror image
Before leaving the room, visitors passed by an interactive display showing the images
that had been taken most recently by the mirror. Here they could select their own mirror
image and send it to themselves by email. (For this purpose, we installed wifi in the
room.) We wanted to offer a simple and fast means to “take home” the mirror image,
also as an alternative to the fashionable selfies that are often shot in museums.
Moreover, the email contained more information than had been shown in the mirror,
including a more detailed description of the selected object and the codes of the six
colours in the visitor’s palette.
The visitor obtained the content of the email by activating a URL and could also share
the content with others via Facebook, Twitter or email by clicking on a button. About
half of the visitors used this option. We found, however, that many of the images were
spread further on Facebook.
2.4 Data visualizations
On a large display, slightly animated data visualizations are shown in a loop, allowing
visitors to reflect on past scans in four different views, one after the other:
1. In the Catwalk, the past ten scan results are shown, appearing in a 2.5D
catwalk presentation, where the visitors’ colour palette silhouettes walk
alongside their corresponding object (see Figure 3).
2. In the Calendar, the palettes of all visitors of the past 30 days can be seen in a
matrix-like arrangement. This view gives an impression of the dominant
colours of the clothes of visitors (see Figure 4).
3. In the Statistics, a visual impression of the statistics of different colours in past
periods is given.
4. In the Extremes view, the “most colourful” and the “most red/green/blue”
visitor’s colour palette is shown in their silhouette, differentiating between
adults and children by a guess based on the height of the scanned person (see
Figure 5).
Fig. 3. The result of past scans in the Catwalk view.
Fig. 4. The Calendar view.
Fig. 5: The Statistics and the Extremes views.
3 Visitors’ emotions, behaviour and opinion
In the case of novel – and usually rather expensive – digital installations it is very
justified to ask whether the investment was worth the trouble. Usually, a digital
installation is regarded as modern, and it is praised by the media for this reason. But
how to grasp the real benefits for the museum: based on feedback in the visitors’ book
(which is still in use)? In terms of the number of visitors? Or of the time spent with the
installation? Or how they behave, what emotions they reveal? Or what they think of it?
Through some measure of what visitors really learnt, thanks to the installation? How
should these aspects be aggregated?
From the perspective of the designers, the efficiently and the ease of the interaction
and the appropriateness of the user interface are of also interest – and they may turn out
to work differently than expected. Moreover, one should remember that feedback from
different people may differ based on static as well as time-based dynamic personal
characteristics. With all this in mind, we conducted a small-scale study, trying to
explore several of the above aspects.
3.1 The empirical study
We collected data from 135 visitors. Their age group, nationality, gender and type of
visit (individual or in a couple, family or group) was also recorded. We also
interviewed six museum guards who had been observing and helping visitors for
months and four guides offering special activities for young visitors, by asking open-
ended self-completed questions.
The major body of the research was carried out by means of recording observed
behaviour in the room of the ColourMirror, and by a short interview just after visitors
had left the room. The data was collected during the winter months, in two-hour
recording sessions both during the week and on weekends, by four coders who had
received some initial training. The observer, sitting in a corner inconspicuous as a
museum guard, registered data on a tablet in a Google form, considering:
a) the type and number of scans (some people modified their dress, pose, formed
groups);
b) the emotions observed (expressed by the face of the visitors, sometimes by
their body language, and very often also verbally);
c) the amount of attention paid to the data visualizations;
d) whether the visitors emailed their mirror image.
In the interview, the visitor was asked a few questions. The answers were registered
by the interviewer in the same online form, ticking on choices characteristic of the
answers. Spontaneous additional remarks from visitors were typed in. The interview
addressed, among others:
a) recall of the (first) received object;
b) liking for the received object;
c) whether the visitor would track down the object in the exhibition;
a) how they thought the ColourMirror worked;
b) in what way they experienced the ColourMirror installation;
c) what they thought of digital installations in museums in general.
3.2 Major findings
Based on the collected empirical data (shown in Table 1 and 2), we sum up the major
conclusions around four general questions.
Table1. Summary of visitors’ data concerning the ColourMirror and the object shown.
ASPECT
DISTINCT CATEGORIES with occurrences (%)
emotion displayed
happy
neutral
other
72.6
17
10.4
recall of the received object
very good
satisfactory
false or none
71.5
24.4
4.1
satisfaction with the object
pleased
neutral
unsatisfied
72.6
20.2
7.2
would track down the object
for sure
perhaps
not
81
10.7
8.3
Table 2. Summary of visitors’ opinion about the ColourMirror and digital installations in
museums.
QUESTION
ANSWERS with occurrences (%)
How does the ColourMirror
work, in principle?
correct answer
approximate
incorrect/no idea
33.3
36.7
30
How do you characterise
the ColourMirror?
great, funny
modern
for youngsters
80.6
27.3
6.5
What do you think of digital
installations in museums?
motivates to
visit
do not care
dislike the idea
77.6
18.4
4
How did people use the ColourMirror? About half of the visitors observed did not
know what to do in the room, so they asked for assistance from a guard (one was always
present in the room). From accounts by the guards, even more people needed some
amount of help. Children and young people, on the other hand, had hardly any difficulty
and they were the ones to invent ways to receive different objects (e.g. by changing
their dress or forming groups). Also foreign tourists, who were less hurried and had
usually read the description outside, were more at ease in general, than Hungarian
visitors. As we discovered, it was here that many of the subjects met an interactive
museum installation for the first time in their life, and some regarded the Mirror as an
exhibit to be watched but not to be used. People over 60 complained several times about
the lack of detailed written instructions on what to do, and about a fear of becoming
awkward in public with such an installation. They asked for assistance from the guard.
As a reaction to this somewhat unexpected outcome, we added more instructions to the
display, telling visitors what to do.
As for the engagement with the installation, children and teenagers spent more time
in the room, were at ease and kept experimenting (e.g. by changing their dress or
forming groups), while people above 60 often needed assistance to get started, and
hardly went for more than a single scan.
The data visualization could not compete for attention with the mirror itself: people
in general did not look at all the four visualizations and found some of them (Extremes,
Statistics) difficult to interpret. However, foreigners (e.g. tourists) spent a larger amount
of time observing and discussing the visualizations.
From the point of view of the design and the technical solutions, we (the designers
and programmers) spotted some anomalies that visitors usually did not notice. It turned
out that certain types of textiles (corduroy, shiny leather) fooled the detection of a
motionless visitor, as their reflection was constantly changing. Due to the lack of light
in the windowless room and the low quality of the built-in camera of the Kinect, the
scanned colours were not always true to life. The complex selection criteria made sure
that the many visitors who wore dark colours also received an object. On the other hand,
the colour of the skin was always taken into account, which made it difficult at times
to interpret the match even if somebody was wearing at least some bright colours.
How did people experience the ColourMirror? Visitors enjoyed the experience: they
were smiling or laughing (72.6%) or pleasantly surprised (7.4%) when their object
showed up. If they were with someone else, they also made emotionally charged
comments about the objects.
Children and young adults became especially engaged, made further scans, and
experimented by changing their dress or altering their pose. Some children spent more
than ten minutes in the room, and several visitors returned later for a second try.
We also expected that the ColourMirror would confront visitors with their clothing
habits, and with the tendency of Hungarians to wear dark colours. We have some clear
but anecdotal evidence for this: some people did return in different outfits and
commented on the dominance of grey and dark colours of the visitors shown in the data
visualizations.
How did people perceive the object they were assigned? More than 95% of the
visitors could recall the object, over 71% of them very well (describing its details,
quoting its textual description).
A majority of the people (72%) were happy with the object they received. When they
were not, the negative linguistic connotations of certain objects as well as gender
mismatches (a man receiving a woman’s dress) were mentioned as reasons for disliking
it. In the case of indifference, aesthetic aspects were sometimes mentioned.
81% of the people planned to track down “their” object – even in cases when they
did not like it. Hence the “mirrored object” served as an entry anchor to the nearly four
hundred exhibits.
People identified with the object – they mostly used terms such as “I am a jar” in
spontaneous outbreaks, and in the feedback in the visitors’ book. This identification
was beyond expectations: people were eager to seek (and find) psychological and life-
style references in the object they received. People talked spontaneously and
passionately about their feelings and assumptions, even to strangers.
What did people think of the ColourMirror, and of digital installations in
museums? Only about one third of the subjects had the right idea about the working of
the mirror, one third had no idea or gave very strange answers (assuming for example
that it was based on an X-ray scan, or an analysis of their shape). This result really
surprised us, as it was explained in a text outside the entrance of the room how the
installation functioned, and also on the mirror whenever an object got displayed. It
seems that many of the people did not read these texts at all (though we did not
explicitly check this).
A vast majority (above 80%) of the subjects did like the ColourMirror and found it
a joyful, funny, enjoyable experience. They liked to find such a cheerful installation in
a place as “serious” as a museum. More than a quarter (also) described it as “modern”.
For a vast majority of the subjects (more than 77%), digital installations offer an
additional motivation to visit a museum.
Did people share digitally the object they received? Only about half of the visitors
sent their mirror image to themselves. Those who did not were mostly above 50, and
they explained that they do not use social media. On the other hand, we traced the sent
images and found that they spread quickly over Facebook. Thus the visitors themselves
spread the news about the exhibition.
Some visitors wanted to know more about the object they received. For this purpose,
after the study we expanded the e-mail in which the mirror image was forwarded with
a textual description of the object.
3.3 Feedback from the museum staff
During the 16 months of the exhibition we received much positive feedback in the
media (even in television), and also from museum professionals. We conducted a
small survey with the six guards who were on duty in the room, and four people who
were organizing activities for children in the museum. The qualitative answers from
the guards were in line with the major findings suggested by the empirical data. They
all liked the installation very much, and enjoyed that – finally – it put them in a more
interesting role than just disciplining visitors: their help was needed and appreciated,
and they strayed into conversation with visitors. They were also pleased that – in the
huge staff of the museum– they were addressed as competent people in the research.
The animators reinforced the impression that children loved the installation. The
only problem they had was the inevitable queuing effect, when complete classes visited
the exhibition. They found that similar digital installations should become a regular
item with all exhibitions. The management and direction of the museum was very
pleased by the free PR due to the mirror images of artefacts that were shared by visitors
on Facebook. They were planning to use the ColourMirror in dedicated campaigns and
to provide more publicity for e.g. data visualizations on the website of the museum, but
after all this has not happened so far.
4 Discussion
The ColourMirror is a novel and unique installation. However, several of the lessons
learnt are of a general scope.
1. People can engage and even identify with objects if they encounter them in a
playful context. Besides “having fun”, we managed to focus their attention
on a singular exhibit, and by this, get them interested in the exhibition.
2. The installation turned visitors (and guards) into participants. It evoked
discussion even among visitors who did not know each other. It helped to
increase the impact of the exhibition.
3. It connected artefacts with an every-day aspect of the life of the visitors (that
is, how colourfully they dress). In this way, it also underlined the major
message of the exhibition – the rich use of colours in past centuries.
4. The ongoing development of the enabling technologies (e.g. small and cheap
sensors, powerful processors in mobile devices, the scaling of image
processing, internet and wireless communication) open up entirely new
domains of applications. A novel, surprising and engaging installation can
serve several of the objectives listed in the introduction, and possibly even
better than more direct types of application that have already been in use in
museums
The empirical study revealed that with a single installation, we could accomplish 5 of
the 11 potential functions listed in section 1.2, namely:
1. facilitating active learning,
2. enabling a playful physical activity,
3. making visitors emotionally involved,
4. inducing discussion between visitors,
5. reaching out to potential visitors.
The ColourMirror itself can be used in other public spaces than the museum – this
would also provide a way to “keep in touch” with the collection of the museum,
which will be closed to the public for several years. On the other hand, the same idea
could be adopted for other collections, especially for paintings. Also, the colour-based
query could serve the basis for different campaigns and competitions, e.g. who is able
to receive from the mirror objects that rarely appear as a query result, or appointing
the most colourful visitor of a certain period.
In such a new field of application, the possible genres, the criteria of good design
and success and the methods of evaluation all have to be established. This is especially
difficult compared to the traditional fields of application of computer science (such as
banking or manufacturing) for the following reasons:
a) The collection, the mission and the audience of museums are significantly
different.
b) In the process of creating applications, there has to be a close collaboration
and a mutual understanding of each other’s disciplines, working methods and
values between museologists/curators and computer scientists/programmers,
and this must be extended to other players (visual designers, museum
educators, marketing experts), each of whom have their own objectives.
c) Data collection and evaluation of digital installations is (still) rarely done,
connected to a lack of resources and the short time-span of temporary
exhibitions.
Acknowledgements The ColourMirror was designed and implemented by an
interdisciplinary team: Zoltán Csík-Kovács, Ágoston Nagy, Gáspár Hajdu, Gábor Papp,
Bence Samu and Zsófia Ruttkay. We are thankful for Szilvia Silye for her contribution
to the design and execution of the empirical study. We are also grateful to the staff of
the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, and to Dániel Kiss for his help with preparing
this article.
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