Experiments with Mobile Drama in an Instrumented Museum for Inducing Conversation in Small Groups

摘要

Small groups can have a better museum visit when that visit is both a social and an educational occasion. The unmediated discussion that often ensues during a shared cultural experience, especially when it is with a small group whose members already know each other, has been shown by ethnographers to be important for a more enriching experience. We present DRAMATRIC, a mobile presentation system that delivers hour-long dramas to small groups of museum visitors. DRAMATRIC continuously receives sensor data from the museum environment during a museum visit and analyzes group behavior from that data. On the basis of that analysis, DRAMATRIC delivers a series of dynamically coordinated dramatic scenes about exhibits that the group walks near, each designed to stimulate group discussion. Each drama presentation contains small, complementary differences in the narrative content heard by the different members of the group, leveraging the tension/release cycle of narrative to naturally lead visitors to fill in missing pieces in their own drama by interacting with their fellow group members. Using four specific techniques to produce these coordinated narrative variations, we describe two experiments: one in a neutral, nonmobile environment, and the other a controlled experiment with a full-scale drama in an actual museum. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that narrative differences will lead to increased conversation compared to hearing identical narratives, whereas the second experiment tests whether switching from presenting a drama using one technique to using another technique for the subsequent drama will result in increased conversation. The first experiment shows that hearing coordinated narrative variations can in fact lead to significantly increased conversation. The second experiment also serves as a framework for future studies that evaluate strategies for similar adaptive systems.