Interaction design for cultural heritage. A robotic cultural game for visiting the museum’s inaccessible areas.

Abstract

Nowadays many museum areas are not accessible to visitors because of issues related to security or architectural barriers. Make explorable these areas is one of the sensible topics in the cultural debate about the enhancing of the visiting experience. The paper describes the design of a roboethics activity conceived in codesign with museum stakeholders (Museum Guides, Museum Curators, Telecommunication Experts, Designers and Final Users) with the purpose to face this problem. After a first stage, in which a telepresence robot piloted by the Museum Guide it has been used a to show the inaccessible areas of the museum; it is going to be performed a second stage of the project with the scope of building a more interactive visiting experience. To satisfy this need an interactive game, it has been developed. The game is based both on the robot ability to be driven by the visitors and also on the capacity of the robot to been used as a platform for the digital storytelling. The whole experience it has been designed and tested with the support of high school students.