Italian Semester of Presidency of the European Union

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE OF MINERVA

Quality for cultural Web sites
Online Cultural Heritage for Research, Education and Cultural Tourism Communities

Parma, 20-21 November 2003, Auditorium Paganini

Alessandro Mecocci
(Meta.Com)

Advanced Fruition and Management Systems for Museums

ABSTRACT

Prof. Mecocci is responsible of the Scientific Board of META.COM, a company of the META group (www.gruppometa.it ), a leading group in the production of innovative solutions and products for cultural heritage, digital libraries and archivist heritage management, among which is for instance MuseumNet©, a product which permits an overall control of multimedia equipment of a museum and enhances the possibility of networking museums as well as having them actively present on the web. Prof Mecocci will present a lecture on "Advanced Fruition and Management Systems for Museums". The focus of the lecture concerns the notion of museum reactivity or in other terms how can museum go beyond the traditional static model of fruition. Technically, this has been done, by designing various Multisensor Social Interfaces. These are new interaction metaphors that allow multiple visitors to interact in parallel with multiple computers inside a cultural institution as a museum; moreover, the interactions can be autonomously initiated by the system so enabling interaction mechanisms completely different from traditional approaches. The system has been practically implemented at the Museum of Monticchiello, nearby Siena, devoted to Ancient Theatrical Arts. In the near future, a support subsystem for emotional agents will be added to the Proposed architecture, so that the MSIs will have their artificial psychology. This fact will add new dimensions to the interaction activities by enabling "motivational behaviours" based on the MSIs internal state. The overall system has been integrated in the MuseumNet© architecture.