Can’t Touch This – The Design Case Study of a Museum Installation

Abstract

Museum exhibits offer particular challenges for the design of interactive installations, as visitors usually cannot directly interact with artefacts. This paper presents a depth-sensor based system for interaction via pointing gestures that we developed for an interactive museum installation (IMI), permanently installed in a showcase of the grave of a Germanic princess. Users interact by walking up to and pointing at artefacts within the showcase. Our IMI determines which artefact is addressed and displays corresponding information on a screen. The IMI also provides a setup-mode for curators for configuration. We describe the system preliminary deployment observations and the considerations involved in negotiating design options. Our case study exemplifies how domain restrictions predominantly curatorial concerns can significantly constrain the space of viable design choices lead to discarding many novel and interesting interaction designs and increase implementation effort.