Panagiotis Vogiatzidakis

The design of location-based games (LBGs) for cultural heritage should ensure the active participation and contribution of local communities and heritage professionals to achieve contextual relevance, importance, and content validity. This paper presents an approach and methods of the participatory and co-design of LBGs that promote awareness and learning about the intangible cultural heritage of craftsmanship and artisanal technology throughout a long-term project from sensitization to implementation. Following the design thinking process, we outline the participatory methods (and reflect on results and lessons learnt) of involving cultural heritage professionals, local communities, and visitors (users) of museums and cultural settlements, mainly: field visits, design workshops, field playtesting, and field studies. We discuss issues of participatory design that we experienced throughout the project such as participant centrality and representativeness, producing tangible output from meetings, co-creation of content via playtesting, and implications from the pandemic. This work contributes a case of participatory and co-design of LBGs for cultural heritage that is characterized by longevity and engagement throughout the design process for three LBGs of a museum network in different cultural sites.

Expert reviews of mobile games for cultural heritage (MG-CH) may predictively assess various aspects of game and content design in an iterative development process. They are not common because finding experts with knowledge for all aspects of MG-CH is difficult, while related heuristic sets are lengthy. Furthermore, ecologically valid evaluations of MG-CH must be performed in the field and examine various dimensions of playability, including gameplay, usability, functionality, and contextual factors about the location and the cultural content. To address those challenges, we have constructed a formative, empirical design review method of MG-CH, which requires experts to perform field playtesting in pairs, with minimal researcher intervention. We have refined the approach to collect data and insights about various aspects of playability; and then applied it in the evaluation of two MG-CH for UNESCO intangible CH sites that follow the same system and gameplay design. We found that the method yields many performance indicators and playability findings; facilitates participants to propose thoughtful recommendations; and affords in-situ production of cultural content.

Touchless, mid-air gesture-based interactions with remote devices have been investigated as alternative or complementary to interactions based on remote controls and smartphones. Related studies focus on user elicitation of a gesture vocabulary for one or a few home devices and explore recommendations of respective gesture vocabularies without validating them by empirical testing with interactive prototypes. We have developed an interactive prototype based on spatial Augmented Reality (AR) of seven home devices. Each device responds to touchless gestures (identified from a previous elicitation study) via the MS Kinect sensor. Nineteen users participated in a two-phase test (with and without help provided by a virtual assistant) according to a scenario that required from each user to apply 41 gestural commands (19 unique). We report on main usability indicators: task success, task time, errors (false negative/positives), memorability, perceived usability, and user experience. The main conclusion is that mid-air interaction with multiple home devices is feasible, fairly easy to learn and apply, and enjoyable. The contributions of this paper are (a) validation of a previously elicited gesture set; (b) development of a spatial AR prototype for testing of mid-air gestures, and (c) extensive assessment of gestures and evidence in favor of mid-air interaction in smart environments.

If mid-air interaction is to be implemented in smart home environments, then the user would have to exercise in-air gestures to address and manipulate multiple devices. This paper investigates a user-defined gesture vocabulary for basic control of a smart home device ecosystem, consisting of 7 devices and a total of 55 referents (commands for device) that can be grouped to 14 commands (that refer to more than one device). The elicitation study was conducted in a frame (general scenario) of use of all devices to support contextual relevance; also, the referents were presented with minimal affordances to minimize widget-specific proposals. In addition to computing agreement rates for all referents, we also computed the internal consistency of user proposals (single-user agreement for multiple commands). In all, 1047 gestures from 18 participants were recorded, analyzed, and paired with think-aloud data. The study reached to a mid-air gesture vocabulary for a smart-device ecosystem, which includes several gestures with very high, high and medium agreement rates. Furthermore, there was high consistency within most of the single-user gesture proposals, which reveals that each user developed and applied her/his own mental model about the whole set of interactions with the device ecosystem. Thus, we suggest that mid-air interaction support for smart homes should not only offer a built-in gesture set but also provide for functions of identification and definition of personalized gesture assignments to basic user commands.

Mid-air interaction involves touchless manipulations of digital content or remote devices, based on sensor tracking of body movements and gestures. There are no established, universal gesture vocabularies for mid-air interactions with digital content or remote devices based on sensor tracking of body movements and gestures. On the contrary, it is widely acknowledged that the identification of appropriate gestures depends on the context of use, thus the identification of mid-air gestures is an important design decision. The method of gesture elicitation is increasingly applied by designers to help them identify appropriate gesture sets for mid-air applications. This paper presents a review of elicitation studies in mid-air interaction based on a selected set of 47 papers published within 2011–2018. It reports on: (1) the application domains of mid-air interactions examined; (2) the level of technological maturity of systems at hand; (3) the gesture elicitation procedure and its variations; (4) the appropriateness criteria for a gesture; (5) participants number and profile; (6) user evaluation methods (of the gesture vocabulary); (7) data analysis and related metrics. This paper confirms that the elicitation method has been applied extensively but with variability and some ambiguity and discusses under-explored research questions and potential improvements of related research.