Embodied edutainment experience in a museum: discovering glass-blowing gestures

Abstract

Current technological progress has provided innovative methods and tools for learning and discovering various aspects of manual professions. To valorize their artifacts and mostly the craft and know-how behind them, museums are more and more attracted by these innovative interactive technologies. In this paper, we present an interactive installation for embodied edutainment experience developed in the framework of the exhibition "savoir-verre"implemented at "Musée des Arts et Métiers"in Paris. This installation had a double goal: to augment and improve the entire museum visiting experience (entertainment) and at the same time to go deeper into craft discovery, to learn the basics of the expert postures/gestures (education). In front of the camera, that captured their motions, visitors were invited to imitate 3 gestures of an expert glass-blower and received real-time multimodal (visual and auditory) feedback, guiding the execution of the gestures. The quantitative analysis of user's motion data captured during the use of the installation highlights its positive effect on users' engagement, on their spatial and temporal performance, confirming the initial hypothesis that the multimodal real-time feedback can contribute to a better understanding and assimilation of expert gestures in glass blowing.