Studying Different Methods of Providing Input to Collaborative Interactive Museum Exhibit Using Mobile Devices

Museums receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, and the mobile devices they carry with them expand the range of possibilities for museum exhibit design. We wish to design interactive exhibits that take advantage of the presence of these devices to help museum exhibits “scale up” to support variable-sized groups of visitors, and to support collaborative interactions within those groups. The choice of user input methods can impact learnability and sociability, so our research project, WeTangram, aims to evaluate three different approaches to providing input to an interactive exhibit via mobile devices. We plan to conduct an experiment to study how small groups of people make use of these interfaces, evaluating: (1) the learnability of providing input, (2) the impact of the input method on sociability and group efforts to achieve a common goal, and (3) the feasibility of the input method for use in museum exhibits.