Shaking the dead

We consider how visits to un-stewarded historical and archaeological sites - those that are unstaffed and have few visible archaeological remains - can be augmented with multimodal interaction to create more engaging experiences. We developed and evaluated a mobile application that allowed multimodal exploration of a rural Roman fort. Sixteen primary school children used the application to explore the fort. Issues, including the influence of visual remains, were identified and compared with findings from a second study with eight users at a separate site. From these, we determined key design implications around the importance of physical space, group work and interaction with the auditory data.