Understanding Art Exhibitions: From Audioguides To Multimedia Companions

Giuseppe Barbieri1 , Augusto Celentano2 , Renzo Orsini2 and Fabio Pittarello2

1
Dipartimento di Storia dellarte e conservazione dei beni artistici, Universit`a Ca Foscari, Venezia, Italia
figaro@unive.it
2
Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit`a Ca Foscari, Venezia, Italia
{auce,orsini,pitt}@dsi.unive.it

Abstract
This paper elaborates on mobile devices for assisting the
visitors of an art exhibition to understand the exhibition and
its content. A model for a new class of multimedia guide is
described, instantiated into a prototype for an exhibition on
sacred Ethiopian art in Venice. The model offers several levels of use to different classes of users. A prototype guide has
been evaluated through questionnaires and traces of users
exploration, automatically extracted from the guide records.

Introduction

Understanding art requires education; even the supposed

evidence of meaning of Classic art and Renaissance painting (to cite only two easy examples) requires a museum visitor to be knowledgeable about the author and to understand
elements of composition, history, methodology of analysis,
detail interpretation, which are at the core of courses on art
history and art criticism.
Modern and contemporary art, loosing the aesthetic resemblance between the artwork appearance and the subject, and multiplying the materials and techniques, makes
more evident the need for organized and methodic knowledge about the artist, his/her historical, political and cultural
context, the used techniques and their role in the society, the
overall context in which the artwork has been conceived,
made and exposed to the public.
Generally speaking, any form of art presents so many
facets that its fruition cannot rely on the visitor immediate
perception only, but requires (at different degrees) explanations and comments to be understood and enjoyed. In museums a basic level of knowledge is provided by two common devices: the large panels introducing the artworks of
a room, of an author, or of a section, and the (small) labels
aside each artwork with basic data such as title and date and,
sometimes, a short comment.

Labels have been introduced by Tommaso Puccini, the

superintendent of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, who lived
between 1749 and 1811; around 1780, he decided to place
a label aside each artwork with the name of the artist, the
subject, the execution date and the technique used. This
practice ended an era when fruition of art was a pure aesthetic process, in which the visitor could recognize the masterpieces but was otherwise attracted by other issues such as
the vastity and variety of a collection, the personal ability to
discover details, and so on. The labels gave the visitor the
ability to know rather then to experience, replacing knowledge for pleasure: who is the author, what is the content
(often based on allegories or historical events not immediately evident), what inspired the author (e.g., a replica of
another artwork). The personal experience in appreciating
an artwork, often in company of the collectionist hence reserved to few people, was replaced by a collective, accessible knowledge of objective information.
The history of art and of art criticism has been greatly
influenced by this little revolution, but a discussion on such
issues would lead out of the scope of this paper, whose focus
is on the possibility (the need) of regaining (part of) the
ancient esprit that led visitors to art collections, and that
current ITC can help to establish.
It is generally acknowledged that todays attitude in visiting art exhibitions (mainly with masterpieces) is neither
to know nor to experience, but rather to recognize and to
recall; hence, information provided to users must support
knowledge elicitation, which should drive the artwork examination process after recognition has been made.
In the remainder of this paper we shall discuss the main
issues about the design and the evaluation of a new type of
multimedia guide devoted not only to present facts about
the exhibition and the artworks, but mainly to help the visitor to understand what he/she is visiting, integrating factual
information with the proper cultural context. The audiovisual channels used for communicating information might
be used also for addressing the emotional side of the visit,
giving the user the sense of a more complete experience.

A prototype of such a guide, based on the Apple iPod

touch, has been experimented for an exhibition about religious Ethiopian art, Nigra Sum Sed Formosa - Sacred
and Beauty in the Christian Ethiopia, held at Ca Foscari in Venice, Italy from March 13 to May 10, 2009
(http://www.nigrasum.org/).
The guide has been conceived in the framework of a
research project about new interactive systems for rich art
fruition involving the Department of Computer Science and
the Department of History of Arts and Cultural Heritage
Preservation at Ca Foscari University. The goal of the
project is to design multimedia guides that do not address
visitors only with simple, albeit correct, comments on the
artworks on display, but rather provide ample knowledge
about the exhibition themes.
Such a goal requires a balance between the simple linearity of a guided tour aimed at explanation and a rich hypermedia structure aimed at involving the user emotionally. Indeed, it is a goal common to all museum and exhibit guides,
but the ways it is claimed or pursued are varying and, at our
knowledge, often limited by the existing habits and practices about audio guides.

New directions for art guides

From a humanistic perspective a good guide should give

visitors not only information, but also, and mostly, experience coming from the interaction with the artworks. Multimediality, the technological key to unreveal such experience, cannot be limited, as often done, to provide impressive views on information fragments; it must be taken as a
way to allow the visitor to enter the artwork meaning from
a personal emotional point of view. Using interactive multimedia portable devices delivering information in the shape
of engaging audiovisual presentations is a starting point and
not a goal [3, 5].
From a technical perspective designing such a guide
faces several challenges, the most notable being the almost
unreachable ease of use of the widespread and simple, albeit
limited, keypad-based audioguide. Any enrichment leading
to more choices than listening to an audio comment raises
problems of use, dividing the users according to their skill
with portable devices. The operations of an audioguide are
explained and learned in seconds, while any PDA class device requires minutes, a time span unbearable in large museums.
Indeed, PDA class devices are being introduced in museums visited by a large public [2]. An interesting case is
the Ship Museum in Barcelona (http://www.mmb.cat) that
provides visitors with a touch smartphone of the Windows
Mobile class. The PDA functions are constrained to the selection of a presentation typing on a numeric keypad the
number marking the proper museum section. Each presentation is an audio comment, accompanied by additional con-

tent in the shape of images and short texts. As an additional

bonus, the visitors can bookmark relevant images and texts,
that will be sent to their e-mail address at visits end. The
bookmarked information is sent as a simple list of attachments, without any structure or reference to the museum
context.
The Apple iPod touch is changing the landscape of interactive guides, due to the excellent quality of audio and video
playback, to the interaction style and to a fashionable appeal
of the device itself. IPod touch based guides are available
at several museums, among which the New York MoMA
and the Tate Liverpool Gallery are notable examples.
Indeed, in both cases the iPod is used as an unstructured
mediatheque. At MoMA it is promoted as the MoMA Audioguide (http://www.moma.org/visit/plan/atthemuseum/
momaaudio) delivering audio-only comments with limited
interaction capabilities. At Tate Liverpool an exhibition
on Klimt masterpieces was supported by a catalog of
audiovisual presentations with very simple visual content
(http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/
tour.shtm). None of the two guides uses at full extent
the video capabilities of the iPod to enrich the vision of
the artworks, nor they use gestual interaction out of list
selection.

Also the Oberes

Belvedere Gallery in Vienna
(http://www.belvedere.at) delivers guides on iPod touch
devices, which simulate a traditional keypad audioguide.
The user interacts with a virtual keypad displayed on the
iPod screen selecting artworks by number, and listens to
audio comments with very limited playback control: there
are no advance/back controls, the volums is controlled with
the hardware buttons on the iPod side, and the only allowed
operations are pause/resume and return to the keypad for a
new selection. Such a downsizing of the iPod capabilities
turns a sophisticated multimedia device into a very basic
audio player.

The art guide as a visitors companion

The goal of the guide we have designed is to help the

visitor to understand the value (artistic, historical, religious)
of the artworks and of the exhibition as a whole while being on site. Information access modalities support different styles to visit the exhibition, including non-linear visits
thataccording to [4, 7]represent the behaviour of a significant part of visitors. Figure 1shows the organization of
the guide content as it appears through the user interface.
The user can access the content by selecting a section of the
exhibition, a specific artwork from a catalog, a room on a
map, or a keyword from a tag cloud.
Access by section give users information about six exhibition themes: Icons, Crosses, Devotional objects, Religious architecture, Testimonials, and Drawings. The first
three sections deal primarily with artworks of a same type.

Table 1. Questionnaire evaluation - part 1

(a) Guide chapters
Catalog
Rooms Sections Keywords
Used by
85%
81%
69%
66%
Score (15)
4.1
4.1
4.0
4.1

Figure 1. Organization of the guide content

The other three sections include artworks of different types,

homogeneous as to the context to which they refer. Accessing the guide content by section exploits the potential of
the device, with multimedia files such as movie fragments,
audio recordings, images, interviews, traditional religious
songs, and so on.
The artworks are accessed by several catalogs: a general catalog collecting all the artworks, and partial catalogs
for the artworks of a section or located in a room. Each
artwork is presented with an audio comment (much as in a
conventional audioguide), with one or more images that can
be zoomed in to discover details; in some cases a longer audiovisual presentation shows more information through animations and slide shows. A set of maps allows visitors to
access the artworks contained in each room.
User may also access information by selecting keywords
from a tag cloud, an information structure borrowed from
the so-called Web 2.0 and often used to present the result of
the collaborative tagging of users [6]. In this guide the tag
cloud is used to group multimedia presentations by evocative words that are orthogonal to the exhibition sections.
In order to be used by a wide range of users with different
skills and attitudes towards both the Ethiopian culture and
the use of personal devices, the guide has been designed for
being both engaging and usable, fitting the visitors background without being trivial. The graphic appearance has
an important evocative role in suggesting atmospheres and
themes. Real images from the artworks have been used
to identify the different contents, instead of symbolically
styled icons. Navigation is kept at a minimum level of complexity, avoiding deep hierarchies and paths.
Interaction has been designed for being accessiblein
its basic functionalitiesalso by unexperienced users. As a

Used by
Score (15)

(b) Interface functions

Touch
Scroll
Flick
86%
85%
80%
4.2
4.4
4.2

Evaluated by
Score (15)

(c) Content type

Audio
Audio- Artwork
comments
video
pages
81%
78%
82%
3.9
4.1
4.1

Enlarge
53%
4.1

consequence, the standard gesture of tapping on the screen

(the equivalent of the click operation on a desktop interface)
has been extensively used for selecting items and accessing information in menus, indexes and pages. For example,
tapping on the image of an artwork page reveals a popup
menu leading to supplemental audiovisual content. Browsing through artworks is accomplished by the standard iPod
gesture of flicking the pages. More complex gesturessuch
as the enlarging gesture operated with two fingershave
been used only for zooming into images. The evaluation
of the guide use, discussed in Section 4, shows that such
gesture, although intuitive in principle, requires a learning
phase the prevents many visitors to use it.

Evaluation of the guide use

We released three different versions of the guide. The second version, issued shortly after the exhibition opening, was
improved mainly with the content and with a more evident
identification of the guide chapters. The third version of the
guide included a context-dependent audio-visual helpand
further improvements in the navigation structure. In order
to evaluate the effectiveness of the guide we adopted two
different tools: a questionnaire and an automatic tracking
system of user gestures. All the data collected are related to
the second and to the third version of the guide.

4.1

Questionnaire

The questionnaire was submitted to the visitors except in

hours of great affluence. Table 1 presents a synthesis of
the analysis on a sample of 176 questionnaires. A general
appreciation of the guide is evident. However, it is perceivable from Table 1(a) how the habit of using sequential
audio guides influences the visitors that, even in presence
of a more articulated device, privilege direct catalog access
to introductions and theme explanations. It is also evident

from Table 1(b) that the more advanced user functions, such
as multitouch gestures to zoom into images, present some
difficulties, and a consistent part of the users didnt even realize that such function was supported. The results suggest
that multitouch gestures, associated to power and ease of
use in advertising this class of devices, is still not perceived
as a natural interaction and may require a learning phase
hard to be satisfied in the short time of an exhibition visit.
We may expect that, with the rapid spreading of touchbased devices and the standardization of gesture-based interaction, users will be aware of these functions without an
explicit help. The lesson learned for the immediate time is
that we need to support the users with explicit information
about the functions available.
Table 1(c) shows a satisfactory appreciation level for the
different types of content provided by the guide, with a
slight preference for the audiovisual content of the introductory sections and the artwork descriptions, compared to
the audio-only comments associated to the artworks.
Additional information comes from questions related to
the ease of use of the guide and to the availability of help
tools, summarized in Table 2 for versions 2 and 3 of the
guide. Only a minor part of users where often in trouble
when accessing information, as shown in Table 2(a). Most
of them were only sometimes bothered by access problem.
A minor, but significant part of users (i.e. 19%), declared
that they never had problems with the second version of the
guide. The improvements to the third version of the guide
(the availability of a back button and the integrated help)
increased this percentage to 28%.
Table 2(b) shows data about the use of the help: a leaflet
in version 2 and an integrated video presentation in version
3. As expected, the video help was more appreciated, and
was considered useful by the 68% of the users and a must
from an additional 10%. These percentages represents a
considerable improvement if compared to the appreciation
of the paper leaflet, that can be explained in particular by
the contextual access from any section of the guide and by
the use of a video presentation showing the real use of the
device. The printed help had also the problem that in some
cases, due to visitor affluence, leaflets were not available; a
poster displayed near to the iPod counter supplied the same
information, but the high percentage of no answer in the
first row of Table 2(b) is a signal of its inadequacy.
Table 2(c) displays the user responses to difficulties
about navigation in the guide content. For the second version of the guide returning to the starting screen was the
preferred solution, followed by asking assistance to human
guides available in each room. For the third version of
the guide these solutions were still the most used, but with
smaller percentages. It is interesting to note that for this
version of the guide a minor but significant part of the users
relied on the video help for recovering from troubles.

V.2
V.3

Table 2. Questionnaire evaluation - part 2

(a) Ease of use
No answer
No
Some
A lot of
difficulty difficulty
difficulties
7%
19%
63%
11%
4%
28%
54%
14%

(b) Help
No answer
Useless
Useful
Necessary
V.2
49%
10%
35%
5%
V.3
14%
8%
68%
10%

A leaflet for version 2 and an integrated video for version 3

V.2
V.3

(c) Management of difficulties

No answer Home Help Go on
Ask
23%
50%
n/a
14%
25%
32%
38%
14%
14%
18%

V.2
V.3

(d) Request for Additional Support Functionalities

No answer
Help
Back Home Other
27%
15%
42%
27%
1%
47%
4%
22%
21%
7%

Other
2%
3%

Finally, users were asked about their preferences for additional functionalities to improve the ease of use (Table
2(d)). A significant percentage of users of the second version of the guide (42%) requested the availability of a back
button to retrieve their previous steps. Such functionality
was implemented in the third version. The other answers
show that, for both versions of the guide, a part of the users
requested additional functionalities that were already available. This problem might come from the graphical interface style: rather than using standard traditional symbols
for the home and back buttons, we used symbols and colors consistent with the graphic style of the exhibition installation. Some users might have considered these symbols
as decorative elements rather than functional icons, missing
their presence as navigation aids. A final encouraging result
shown in Table 2(d) is that an increasing part of the users of
the third version of the guide (47% vs. 27%) expressed no
need for additional support functionalities.

4.2

User behaviour analysis

User behaviour analysis is based on the automatic recording of user activity. We have collected more than 100.000
records, each corresponding to a user gesture on the screen
or to a file access, counting for more than 900 different visits in a time span of about nine weeks. We plan to use data
mining techniques to analyze a so huge collection and to
reveal recurrent user patterns; a preliminary synthetic analysis of the traces has already given us precious knowledge
about the real use of the guide.
A first result is that approximatively 15% of the visitors

Home
Catalog
Sections
Maps
Tags
Seclist
Maplist
Video
Artwork

- 1.669 1.254 3.035

928
509
1.187
- 1.003
744
- 4.333
932
- 1.219
94
1.297
- 1.508
- 1.275
2.141
441
- 1.416
-

two
rk
Ar

Vid
eo

pli
st
Ma

list
Sec

Tag
s

Ma

ps

ns
tio
Sec

talo
Ca

Ho

me

Table 3. In and out paths from the guide sections

- 1.634
128
- 1.524
- 3.678
- 1.290
57
- 3.088
22
716
- 14.786

data not shown in Table 3, audio comments associated to

artwork pages have been played in the 30% of the cases.
From these facts a few conclusions can be preliminarily drawn: (1) the visitors have preferred the utility part
of the guide, i.e. the maps and the room catalogs; (2) the
visitors have exploited the audiovisual content of the guide
in a significant way, with a preference for the video presentation with respect to the audio only comments; (3) in
general the interface should be simplified, since the users
have sometimes followed non efficient paths, like returning
to the home page to continue the visit: this is confirmed also
by the questionnaires.

5
who took the guide has used it for less than ten minutes,
while 12% of the visitors uses it for more than two hours.
We do not have data on the average time of visit, but the
exhibition occupies only nine rooms, and two hours are an
ample time. Overall, the average time of guide use is around
52 minutes, distributed according to the Zipf law.
Considering the visit paths, we divided the guide pages
in homogenous sets, and studied the in/out-paths from a set
to another. The result for more than 600 visits from the
second version of the guide is shown in Table 3.
The sets are: Home, the initial page; Catalog, the list
of the artworks; Sections, the pages related to the exhibition themes, with links to the audiovisual content; Maps,
the pages related to the exhibition rooms; Tags, the pages
accessed by keywords from the tag cloud; Seclist, the list
of artworks related to each section; Maplist, the list of the
artworks present in each room; Video, any audiovisual content; Audio, the audio comments of the artworks, Artwork,
the pages containing the description of the artworks. A cell
at row i and column j contains the number of times a page
in set j has been reached from a page in set i. For example, artworks pages (column Artwork are reached primarily
from lists associated to the room maps (3088 times), then
from the general artwork list (Catalog, 1634 times), and
very seldom from the lists associated to the themes pages
(57 times); a large number of times they are reached from
other artwork pages, confirming that the users have used frequently the flicking gesture to advance to the next artwork.
From Table 3 a few important facts come immediately
into evidence: (1) from the home page the preferred next
page is the map, then the catalog, then the theme index and
the tag index; (2) the audiovisual presentations have been
reached almost equally often from the sections pages as
well as from the tags ones; (3) the partial catalogs of each
section have been scarcely used, while those associated to
the exhibition rooms have been heavily used; (4) from the
artworks pages, besides browsing sequentially the artworks,
the users have returned often to the home page, to the room
map and, sometimes, to the artwork catalog. According to

A family of guide models

Tuning the guide to the visitor abilities with personal devices emerged as a requirement during the exhibition after the examination of the early questionnaires. While they
showed that visitors were generally satisfied with the guide,
some visitors returned the device a few minutes after picking it up, saying it was too difficult to use. Such visitors
where mostly elder persons not used to personal devices. In
a few cases they expected a more conventional guide, with
some kind of next button to advance in the exhibition,
making up a simple guided tour.
We cannot detail here, for space constraints, the technical solution adopted for the management of the guide content; the reader is referred to a previous paper [1] for a
deeper presentation. We overview here the overall information organization to understand how the architecture we
have developed can be used to build a family of art guides
with the same basic content units but with different cognitive paths between them and different presentation structures and styles, designed to accomplish the need of users
with different expectations, different abilities in using personal devices, and different experiences with art guides.
Content management is based on a database organizing
the artwork data in collections. Each artwork belongs to
many collections: the general catalog, the set of artworks
contained in a room, the set of artworks of a guide section,
and so on. The database manages also the references to
multimedia files which are the ultimate components of the
guide content; three types of multimedia materialexist: (1)
audio recordings, which are played when the user selects
the audio function in an artwork page, like a conventional
audio guide; (2) audiovisual presentations related to general
information about a theme, accessible from any of the of
six sections and from selected artwork pages; (3) interviews
with the exhibition curators, introducing the main themes of
the exhibition.
It is possible to design, on such material, at least four
different guide models, simpler than the one we have built,
assisting the users in different ways both with respect to
the operation complexity and to the information richness.

Anyway, due to the limited exhibition duration, they were

not implemented at full extent but only at demonstration
level in the iPod devices. The four guide models are: (1) an
audio catalog; (2) an audiovisual catalog; (3) a guided tour;
(4) a guide personalized on the visitor type.
Audio catalog. The set of audio presentations which are
accessed through the catalog section of the guide can be
stored in the iPod Music section, collected into a playlist
with tunes properly numbered to match the artwork identifiers. The guide works as a traditional audioguide except
that, instead of typing the artwork number on a keypad, the
comment is selected from a scrolling list. More than one
catalog can be accessed using several albums and playlists,
each collecting a subset of the audio comments according
to a thematic (section) or spatial (room) criterium.
Audiovisual catalog. The extension from audio-only comments to audiovisual comments turns the audioguide into a
visual guide; however, the guide organization is the same as
the previous case. The presence of video allows the guide
designer to present introductory material, to show and compare artworks, to address the visitor with detailed visual
analysis not available in an audio-only guide. In both guide
models, the previous one and this one, the visitor gestures
are limited to list scrolling and unitouch selection, avoiding
troubles in commanding the guide functions.
Guided tour. The guided tour model is an extension of the
multiple collections model that can be implemented using
different playlists. The sequential activation of the tour step
is built into the iPod control system for audio and video,
which allows the user to go to the previous or next item of
a playlist at play end, or to skip to next or previous step
interrupting the playback. The tour path is represented as a
list, that can be accessed at any intermediate point since the
basic iPod controls allow the user to choose the item to start
with.
Personalized guide. This model opens a wide fan of possibilities due to the many ways in which content, presentation and sequence of information can be combined to fulfill
the needs of different categories of users. In the context
of this paper we simply note that personalization can rely
on the basic mechanism of aggregation of atomic multimedia presentations into sets, called catalogs, playlist, chains,
tours, according to the semantic context in which they are
used. The sets are accessible through two basic mechanisms: direct selection and previous/next selection, both implemented as basic controls in the iPod touch software.

Conclusion

Designing an art guide is an educational activity that must

consider the relationship between the visitors and the artworks in designing what content must be delivered and what

freedom the users have in accessing it. The relationships

are much more complex than those suggested by the linear
paper guides and audioguides usually available at museum
entrances. Yet, the richness of the personal interactive multimedia technology risks to divert the user attention from
content to presentation. Different art contexts and themes
require different styles for presenting an art collection (not
to speak about explaining, which is a debated subject expecially in contemporary art exhibitions) helping the visitors
to access it with satisfaction.
The guide structure and the run-time environment we
have implemented can be adapted to other contents with
limited changes, making this project a first step towards
the building of a generic content management system for
portable multimedia guides. Indeed, we are currently developing an adapted version of the guide for a part of the exhibition Topological gardens, organized by the Philadelphia
Museum as the USA official participation to the Venice Biennale of 2009 and dedicated to Bruce Nauman. The huge
differences in the exhibition themes, the number of artworks
and the way they are presented and commented provide a
good test bed for evaluating the design of the guide and the
appreciation of the visitors.

Acknowledgments
Valeria Finocchi has coordinated the content preparation.
Marek Maurizio has contributed to the implementation of
the content database. The project has been supported by
Banca Popolare Friuladria - Credit Agricole.

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