LADDIE

Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs, Aaron Quigley, David Harris-Birtill

Overview

Large Augmented Digital Displays for Interactive Experiences of Historic Sites.

Scotland is rich in historical and tourist attractions that are a source of revenue for local communities. Oversees holiday visitors visited castles, historic houses and palaces. This project recognises that improving, enhancing and facilitating return or related visits to such sites are significant opportunities. Piquing the interest of a visitor to spend longer at a site, or to visit another related site or indeed plan a return journey here, are invaluable for both the problem holder and tourism sector as a whole. He we were looking to provide “layered accessible interpretation” and “recording and feeding back information on visits”.

Digital displays can be commonly found in many places in our daily life such as information kiosks, airports, campus and workplaces. Large digital displays take advantage of low cost, highly visual approaches to presenting information and the interactive experience. Large digital displays may afford better user experiences by using novel interactive technologies. However, there are some more social and interactive issues we need to be concerned with, such as the design of an engaging experience, the content of the systems and even social and individual experiences. An emerging trend is that large displays coupled with small private devices may help users to interact with large displays and touch-driven displays. There are more interactive digital displays installed in the public areas to support community and social activities. However, the main restriction has been found of this novel technology which is the resistance from the public to participate. Studies have shown the widespread problem of how to attract users to interact with the devices. For example, Agamanolis suggested that “half the battle in designing an interactive situated or public display is designing how the display will invite that interaction”. While Churchill et al pointed that their users needed “constant encouragement and demonstration” to interact with the displays. Hence, it is important for the public digital displays to be attractive to the users. There is a range of related research that illustrate different theories and techniques to entice people to interact with large digital displays in different concerns, such as the content of the displays and interaction techniques.

The LADDIE project began with the design a low fidelity prototype for St Andrews Cathedral as tourists from all over the world come to see the ruins as it contains religious significance and a rich history. Knowing the type of content suitable for a situated display versus a printed guidebook versus a visitors centre required a different study for the requirements capture. After the requirements collection and categorization of the requirements, we considered the following questions, does the content suit for the target groups’ need?, is the information presented in a user-friendly way, enjoy-able, interesting, and supporting a good user experience, does the design provide users enough details of what they want to know, how can we maximise the interactivity between the unit and the visitors, does the system provide the visitors options to access the information they want? The central goal of the paper prototype usability testing is collecting data of users’ performance on predefined tasks.

Laddie is a complex outdoor solution tackling several challenges – St Andrews, Historic Scotland and ADS learned many lessons about installing this kind of technology in an outdoor environment on an historic (remote i.e. no power available) site. To enable the success of the project, we focussed on developing a unit which was, Weatherproof, Under-screen space, Monolithic construction and a Narrow base. Our in-house technicians put together a design and built the unit and operative versions of two of the three goal applications have been implemented.

Videos

Mock up of LADDIE display stand

Mock up layout for LADDIE in St Andrews Cathedral

Example of the LADDIE display in use

Dr. David Harris-Birtill using the LADDIE display

Close look at the timeline of St Andrews Cathedral