Can you see me? Exploring co-visiting between physical and virtual visitors
Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Areti Galani, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/equator

Session: The Enhanced Gallery

We explore issues of social context and interaction between digital and physical museum visitors, using as a focus of discussion the City project, itself set within a larger interdisciplinary project called Equator. We look at collaborative environments that span different media, in particular handheld mobile devices, Web-based hypermedia and 3D virtual environments. We discuss two main strands in our research: the methods and results of two pilot visitor studies in two cultural institutions in Glasgow - the Lighthouse and the House for an Art Lover - and the development of our prototype system which establishes three-sided collaboration between physical, Web and virtual environment visitors. We then present preliminary results and issues arising from our on-going system development and user trials. We conclude with future plans for further system evaluation and deployment.