Different Interaction Frames

Abstract

Digital technologies for museums not only address different themes of a possible visit, as we saw in Chapter 1, and are not only deployed for varying exhibition settings, they can also be strikingly different in terms of which physical-digital interaction they afford and by which hardware and software set-up. This chapter presents key interaction frames to have been applied to digital interventions in museums, and points out their main characteristics and issues relating to the visitor experience. With “interaction frame” we refer to the way in which the interactive experience is articulated in terms of type(s) of: device; input and output mechanisms; and relationship with the physical context of the museum and with other contextual factors, such as the presence of others. However, there is a certain degree of overlap and blending, particularly when considering the type of content each platform can support and the domain where it operates. Aware of this overlap, we distinguish these categories of interaction frames for illustrative and analytical purposes. Furthermore, to illustrate each category we refer to a number of examples. These are not exhaustive by any means, and we include them as selected representative cases of important features of each analytical category.