The worlds of digital content and real objects have collided
Interpretation Planning, Design and Evaluation
The VirtualCase.net Control Centre contains powerful tools for professionals involved in the planning, design and evaluation of museum displays.
Audience analytics are derived from detailed and continuous data collected when each and every visitor views an object in a case that is enabled with ColliderCase or iotaCase. The following measurements are automatically taken:
- Visits
- Unique Visits
- Engagement time (How long a visitor looks at the object or content)
- Party Size
- Age
- Gender
- Emotion
This data builds up over a day, a week, a month and throughout the life of the display. The data is held safe in the Control Centre, where there are powerful query tools to be able to look at the data in different ways.
This will be incredibly useful for planners, designers and evaluators who wish to learn from the data.
Interpretive Planners
It is possible to see whether the theories taken forward at planning stage regarding interest in given items or topics actually hold up in reality. If data is collected across a wide number of Collider or iotaCases, then deeper comparative insight will be available.
Designers
The length of texts, number of images, length of media sequences and complexity of story can all be objectively assessed and even experimented-with.
- Perhaps some people on the team postulate that 7 minutes is too long for a video aimed at 9 year olds - take a look at the engagement time for that case to see if that age range really did depart before 7 minutes was up. If they did, next time make a shorter film and save money.
- Make an alternate version of a display with a longer text - did engagement time actually increase?
- Did visitor engagement start to wane after seeing the 15th case in the gallery?
- Just how interested are different age groups in different objects? Does the associated media make a difference to engagement? What worked, what didn’t?
- For the first time, it will be possible to actually put hard data behind all the rules-of-thumb and inherited knowledge that exists amongst professionals.
Evaluators
It is possible to demonstrate engagement level for a wide variety of audience types by examining the data, rather than gallery floor surveys and questionnaires. Data is collected for each and every visitor, not just those present during evaluation periods. How did engagement differ over time? How does engagement compare with other exhibitions? Other museums? What can we learn and take forward into the next project?