Digital touch replicas as the informing museum object

Museums are predominantly a visual experience, and often lack tangible resources that reflect the breadth of their collections. This prevents visitors learning from a tactile experience and excludes those who need a tactile experience such as people who are blind and visually impaired. 

Accurate replicas of museum objects are a familiar method of providing handling and educational resources, however, there is often the need for additional resources and interpretation to make the experience genuinely inclusive and satisfying, addressing visitors sensory and intellectual needs.

This thesis presents the development of novel augmented Digital Touch Replicas (DTR). DTRs are accurate 3dimensional touch sensitive replicas of museum objects which release multimedia when different areas of the DTRs are explored through touch, activating concealed sensors. This digital information is either site specific to the object, thematic or cocurated content. Alternative narratives and contextual information can be placed onto the same touch-sensitive areas of the replica allowing for a choice of tailored digital interpretation delivered from the same object. 

A mixed method approach was used to explore the design and development of 3 DTRs focusing on the interactions of sighted users and those who were blind or had a visual impairment. Quantitative (touch sensor data) and qualitative data (interviews and observation) were collected to explore user interactions. The results of 3 studies are discussed to understand what features (in both the production of the replica and information delivery) should be retained, modified, or augmented to make the user experience more inclusive and efficient.

A touch-based interaction with the DTR is supplemented with digital interpretation which allows for an initial nonverbal interrogation of the object making the experience available to different ages and sensory capabilities. Knowledge can be constructed though a combination of physical exploration and information released from the object. This combination of physical and thematic information about museum objects on DTRs allows visually impaired and blind people to access objects that would otherwise be unavailable to them in a museum. 

Augmenting different physical features of the DTR object (e.g., enhancing depth profiles or replacing lost elements) was found to provides access to site specific information that would be difficult to locate and describe audibly. The 3 modes of information delivery (tactile, audio, and visual) give different levels and opportunities for accessing information relating to the replica object.

This thesis investigates the efficacy of user interactions, which have been shown to be influenced by the shape and complexity of the replica object and the activation of digital information. The quality of digital information also impacted on how well the users connected with the object. 

A key finding was that sighted and blind and visually impaired users interacted with the replicas differently which impacted on information retrieval from the touch sensitive areas of the object. For unfamiliar objects the blind and visually impaired relied on the successional nature of knowledge accumulated through touch and audio whereas sighted users were observed targeting distinct tactile or visual elements to retrieve information and then ceding to the visual multimedia which superseded their use of touch, and this knowledge can be used to improve the user experience.