Utilization of Audio Guide for Enhancing Museum Experience: Relationships between Visitors' Eye Movements, Audio Guide Contents, and the Levels of Contentment

摘要

Museums provide the opportunities of acquiring knowledge concerning artistic, cultural, historical or scientific interest through a large number of displays. However, even if those masterpieces are visually accessible to all the visitors, the background of these works of art is not necessarily acquired because the visitors do not have enough knowledge to fully appreciate them. Audio guide is a commonly used tool to bridge this gap. The purpose of this study is to gain understandings of relationships between visitors' eye movements for acquiring information by seeing, the contents of the audio guide that should help them to understand the objects by hearing, and the levels of contentment from the museum experience. This paper reports the results of an eye tracking experiment in which nineteen participants were asked to appreciate a variety of pictures with or without audio guide, to fill in a questionnaire concerning subjective feelings, and to attend a follow-up interview session. It is found that the participants could be classified into four categories, suggesting an effective way of providing audio guide.