MobileMuseum: Smart, Portable, and Borrowable Museum Displays to Explore Interaction Patterns and Public Engagement

We explore how smart, portable, tangible, and borrowable museum displays can be used to expand museum outreach, and provide tools for measuring user engagement. Our prototype, MobileMuseum, is a portable museum display on wheels, housing digitally-fabricated replicas of artifacts from a national science and technology museum. To track interactions without cameras, we embedded photo and magnetic door sensors and RFID tags and antenna. Our deployment study was carried out for 2 months and included 4 different locations (2 recreational and 2 educational). Data collected from 6 sensors, 261 hours of field observations, 17 filled questionnaires, and 14 interviews helped us understand interaction patterns. Qualitative and quantitative findings revealed that self-monitored interactions encouraged deeper open-ended exploration. Social sharing increased among people in groups while lower foot traffic increased engagement duration. We present generalizable opportunities for self-monitored Interfaces that lends themselves to social circulation, ‘honeybee-effect’, ‘order effect’, and ‘leftovers’ from users.