Fostering conversation after the museum visit: a WOZ study for a shared interface

According to recent studies, a museum visit by a small group (e. g. a family or a few friends) can be considered successful if conversation about the experience develops among its members. Often people stop at the museum café to have a break during the visit or before leaving. The museum café is the location that we foresee as ideal to introduce a tabletop interface meant to foster the conversation of the visitors. We describe a Wizard of Oz study of a system that illustrates the reactions of people to visual stimuli (floating words, images, text snippets) projected on a tabletop interface. The stimuli, dynamically selected taking into account the topic discussed and a set of communicative strategies, are meant to support the conversation about the exhibition and the visit or to foster a topic change, in case the group is discussing something unrelated to the visit. The results of the Wizard of Oz show that people recognized visuals on the table as `cues` for a group conversation about the visit, and interesting insights about the design have emerged.