Maria Roussou | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (original) (raw)

Papers by Maria Roussou

A presentation about CHESS (Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and... more A presentation about CHESS (Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and Storytelling), a project which aspires to create narrative-driven cultural "adventures", which adapt continuously to their visitors, extend over space (e.g. physical/on-site and virtual/off-site) and time (before, during, and after the visit), and involve users according to their varying interests, needs and desires.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Designing interactive learning experiences for informal educational settings, such as museums, pr... more Designing interactive learning experiences for informal educational settings, such as museums, presents challenges due to the particularities of context. In this presentation, the implications of applying user modeling and human computer interaction methods in the design of informal digital learning experiences will be highlighted. The discussion will be based on the example of the CHESS project and its formative and summative evaluation effort in two museums.

Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Interaction design and children: building a community, 2004

This research sets out to explore children's interaction in immersive Virtual Environments (VEs),... more This research sets out to explore children's interaction in immersive Virtual Environments (VEs), focusing on the role and the effect of interactivity on learning and conceptual change. The intention is to examine how interaction and conceptual learning are related in the context of virtual environments developed primarily for informal educational settings. In order to study this, a set of exploratory studies was carried out with children aged 7-12. The children were asked to complete tasks, such as the assembly of ancient columns from parts, which were designed to promote constructivist learning. Their interaction in the VE was analyzed using an Activity Theory framework [3]. The result of this analysis has informed the design of the main studies, which is currently underway.

This work presents an overview of the EU-funded project EMOTIVE (Emotive virtual cultural experie... more This work presents an overview of the EU-funded project EMOTIVE (Emotive virtual cultural experiences through personalized storytelling). EMOTIVE works from the premise that cultural sites are, in fact, highly emotional places, seedbeds not just of knowledge, but of emotional resonance and human connection. From 2016-2019, the EMOTIVE consortium will research, design, develop and evaluate methods and tools that can support the cultural and creative industries in creating narratives and experiences which draw on the power of 'emotive storytelling', both on site and virtually. This work focuses on the project objectives and results so far and presents identified challenges.

ABSTRACT Digital storytelling is one resource museums have in hand for enriching their offer to a... more ABSTRACT Digital storytelling is one resource museums have in hand for enriching their offer to audiences and society at large. But how is the museum to author digital storytelling experiences that cater to various needs while maintaining scientific integrity? In this paper, we report on a series of experiences involving the creation of several interactive rich-media museum stories. These digital stories were authored by experts who collaborated in numerous intensive, hands-on participatory design workshops held at high-profile cultural sites: the Acropolis Museum in Greece, the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. We present the story-authoring methodology and discuss the lessons learned regarding collaborative authoring of museum stories. We conclude with the potential impact this authoring process may have at the institutional level.

Historical sites are places where the past and the present, the tangible and the intangible meet ... more Historical sites are places where the past and the present, the tangible and the intangible meet and offer visitors an opportunity to immerse themselves in history. The design of digital mobile applications for open-air archaeological sites presents specific challenges; however, it also has the potential to enhance visitor experience in unique ways. In this paper, we focus on the design and evaluation of a dramatized multimedia interactive story for the Ancient Agora (market) of Athens, with the objective to bring the site's function and essence to life. The iterative design and evaluation approach we have followed revealed elements concerning the effective balance between the characteristics of the site, the needs of the visitor and the possibilities offered by the technology, including the role and use of 3D and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, the importance of sound and the level of interaction desired by the users.

This deliverable presents the framework for evaluating the EMOTIVE experiences and related guidel... more This deliverable presents the framework for evaluating the EMOTIVE experiences and related guidelines for carrying this out at the different stages of the project. It includes both the formative and summative stages of evaluation work, as well as detailed plans for the evaluation of the alpha, beta, and final release EMOTIVE tools and experiences. It is divided in two main parts: a) the evaluation of EMOTIVE authoring; and b) the evaluation of EMOTIVE experiencing. The framework integrates qualitative and quantitative methods and empirical studies. The evaluation plans are a ‘living document’ in the sense that they are not set in stone but can be adjusted if the future evaluation work brings up the need for adjusting or extending the framework.

Archeologia e Calcolatori, 2017

The use of interactive storytelling by museums and heritage sites lends to the creation of experi... more The use of interactive storytelling by museums and heritage sites lends to the creation of experiences that support visitors in engaging emotionally with the objects on display. Finding ways to connect to the cultural content is even more important for visitors of archaeological sites due to the often fragmentary nature of the exhibits, which can leave them wondering what was once there and how it relates to them. In this paper, we describe the creation of a prototype mobile storytelling experience that attempts to explore a more emotive kind of storytelling in cultural contexts. The prototype was evaluated in a preliminary study that took place at the archaeological site of the Ancient Agora of Athens. The observations provide insights for the design of future iterations of such emotive storytelling experiences.

Can a chatbot enable us to change our conceptions, to be critically reflective? To what extent ca... more Can a chatbot enable us to change our conceptions, to be critically reflective? To what extent can interaction with a technologically "minimal" medium such as a chatbot evoke emotional engagement in ways that can challenge us to act on the world? In this paper, we discuss the design of a provocative bot, a "bot of conviction", aimed at triggering conversations on complex topics (e.g. death, wealth distribution, gender equality, privacy) and, ultimately, soliciting specific actions from the user it converses with. We instantiate our design with a use case in the cultural sector, specifically a Neolithic archaeological site that acts as a stage of conversation on such hard themes. Our larger contributions include an interaction framework for bots of conviction, insights gained from an iterative process of participatory design and evaluation, and a vision for bot interaction mechanisms that can apply to the HCI community more widely. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms; Interaction techniques.

The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites, 2019

2017 23rd International Conference on Virtual System & Multimedia (VSMM), 2017

In this paper, we firstly critique the state of the art on Virtual Museums (VM) in an effort to e... more In this paper, we firstly critique the state of the art on Virtual Museums (VM) in an effort to expose the many opportunities available to enroll these spaces into transformative and engaging cultural experiences. We then outline our attempts to stretch beyond the usual VM in order to connect it to visitors in a measurably emotional, participatory, interactive and social fashion. We discuss the foundations for a conceptual framework for the creation of VMs, grounded in a user-centered design methodology and related design and evaluation guidelines. We then introduce two main cultural heritage sites, which are used as case studies at the core of our efforts, and conclude by describing the many challenges they bring for pushing the boundaries on the human-felt impact of the virtual museum.

Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2018

A multitude of challenges comes into play when attempting to design (and evaluate) an interactive... more A multitude of challenges comes into play when attempting to design (and evaluate) an interactive digital storytelling experience for use by visitors in a museum. This paper reports on the evaluation of the prototype mobile-based storytelling "guides" designed, developed and deployed as part of a research project at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. Experiences designed for different visitor profiles were evaluated several times throughout the iterative design process, in a number of on-site studies, and with more than 180 museum visitors of all ages (with this paper reporting on two studies conducted with a total of 53 users visiting individually or in pairs). The evaluation methods included ethnography (i.e., observation of visitors in the Museum's galleries), pre-and post-experience in-depth interviews and questionnaires to measure the Users' Experience (UX), as well as data logging. The analysis of the data focused on themes representing components of the experiences, such as interactive story plot and narration, staging and way-finding in the physical space, personalization and social interaction. Our findings confirmed that understanding UX and what makes it effective or not in the rich context of a cultural setting is a complex endeavor. The paper discusses our findings and proposes relevant recommendations for the design of digital experiences for cultural, educational, and recreational purposes.

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2017

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, Jul 31, 2013

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional ex... more Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work.

Proceedings. IEEE 1998 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (Cat. No.98CB36180)

This paper describes the NICE project, an immersive learning environment for children implemented... more This paper describes the NICE project, an immersive learning environment for children implemented in the CAVE and related multiuser virtual reality (VR) technologies. The NICE project provides an engaging setting where children construct and cultivate simple virtual ecosystems, collaborate via networks with other remotelylocated children, and create stories from their interactions in the real and virtual world.

The CHESS project has been working with Cité de l'espace, a space technology centre, to explore t... more The CHESS project has been working with Cité de l'espace, a space technology centre, to explore the use of tablets and mobile phones to deliver visitor experiences that integrate across multiple experiences. In this paper, we articulate three key challenges present at Cité, describe a prototype experience developed by CHESS, and present a set of observations developed through an evaluation conducted in October 2012.

CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems on - CHI EA '13, 2013

Sets of "personas" representing archetypical visitors of two very different museums, the Acropoli... more Sets of "personas" representing archetypical visitors of two very different museums, the Acropolis Museum in Greece and Cité de l"Espace in France, were defined and described as part of a multitude of user-centered design methods used to better understand the needs of visitors and develop for them a personalized mobile storytelling experience. Here we reflect on the role and impact that these personas have had, not only on the design process but also as a mechanism to support the story authors and to bootstrap personalization of experiences. We conclude with a discussion of research challenges inherent in the integration of personas directly into systems intended to support the personalization of experiences.