For the last two years, the CHESS project has been prototyping and evaluating visitor experiences in collaboration with Cité de l’Espace, a space technology centre in Toulouse. These experiences consist of fictional stories, told through the medium of an iPad, and incorporating a variety of media types including audio recordings, photographs, interactive games and augmented reality. Family groups are an important element of the visitor base at Cité, and the design and production process targets families with relatively young children.
Cité presents an interesting challenge for experience design, in that the site integrates elements of indoor and outdoor space. A domed exhibition hall contains small-scale interactive exhibits, whilst a large outdoor area presents replicas of key space technologies such as the Ariane 5 or Mir. Some outdoor exhibits also include indoor areas. Visitors can walk through the narrow corridors of the Mir, where they can see a recreation of life on a space station. They can also walk under the engines of an Ariane 5 and into an exhibition space that illustrates its design and use.
In designing and evaluating mobile experiences for this site, we have uncovered and explored a number of issues which are relevant to sites which integrate indoor and outdoor spaces, and which we report on in this paper. Key issues include:
• how to handle transitions from indoor to outdoor space
• how to support navigation in the absence of an all-encompassing location system (given that GPS works outdoors but not indoors)
• how to design interfaces that are robust in the presence of high levels of natural light
• the impact of experiences on visitors who are not engaged in them.
Research presented in our paper draws on observational studies of visitors interacting with prototype experiences, and on participatory design sessions with museum professionals.
