GroupAixplorer: An Interactive Mobile Guide for Small Groups

Motivation

Mobile digital guides are a convenient way to provide tourists with rich information about visited sites, such as historical buildings of a city or exhibits in a museum. In recent years, more and more cultural institutions have started to offer such tours, as they have many advantages over traditional media. Today's digital guides, however, offer no possibility for groups to listen to content together synchronously. Additionally, most systems tend to isolate visitors from each other due to the way people need to interact with the devices. This is a severe limitation as most people visit museums in a group.

What is GroupAixplorer?

GroupAixplorer is our approach of mobile guide system suitable to provide small groups of museum visitors with a group experience. It features a quest-game to encourage collaboration and social interaction in the group, while mediating stories, anecdotes and knowledge around the exhibits in synchronous audio clips.

The people behind GroupAixplorer

GroupAixplorer is a research project by Martin Wermers, Gero Herkenrath and Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group.

Publications

2011

• Martin Wermers, Gero Herkenrath and Jan Borchers. GroupAixplorer: An Interactive Mobile Guide for Small Groups.  In CHI '11: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2011.