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Bringing sites to life with iBeacons
- 1. Leicester Castle Beacon App Search for “Leicester Castle“
- 2. Leicester Castle Tells its Story Giasemi Vavoula University of Leicester gv18@le.ac.uk Bringing Sites to Life with iBeacon-based mobile interpretation
- 4. A problem to solve: limited interpretation and resources
- 5. A technology to explore: BLE beacons
- 6. BLE beacons – what you need • BLE beacons • Content / beacon management system • Beacon app • BLE device to run the app
- 7. An opportunity: Digital R&D Fund for the Arts • Leicester Castle Tells its Story was funded by a grant from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts (Nesta, Arts & Humanities Research Council and the National Lottery through Arts Council England) • The award was to develop BLE beacon-based heritage interpretation for a historic building • Project partners – Leicester City Council (Arts and Museums Service) (Project Lead, Arts Partner) – School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester (Academic Partner) – Locly (Technical Partner) – Metro-Boulot-Dodo (Creative Content Partner)
- 8. Starting point What can BLE beacons do for an empty, listed Castle that opens its doors to the public once a month, with historical interpretation provided only by sessional staff and printed information sheets? (and for dozens other historic buildings and venues in similar situations?)
- 9. Outline • Part I: What we built • Part II: How we built it • Part III: Why we built it (that way) • Part IV: What we found out (research findings) • Part V: What we learned (experiential findings)
- 10. Part I: What we built
- 11. The Beacon app
- 12. The Green Bicycle Murder Trail
- 13. The Court Audio Trail
- 14. The Family Trail
- 16. Part II: How we built it
- 17. R&D ProcessStage1 Visitor research Potential visitor research Visitor Observation Literature Review Content Research / Generation Stage2 App version 1 Visitor evaluation App version 2 Visitor evaluation Usability testing Stage3 Final app Summative visitor evaluation Requirements
- 18. locly • “an easy-to-use, self-service platform for creating professional and engaging proximity iBeacon experiences for mobile users” • National Slate Museum, pilot in Apr 2014; community generated beacon tour Sep 2014 • Apps for iOS and Android, no app development costs* • Support for range of content & interactivity • Beacon management and content management • Ongoing development, improvement oriented
- 19. locly platform: how it works Beacons Content Tour Site Project Place 1 Card 1: text Beacon 1 Card 2: widget Beacon 2 Place 2 Card 3: audio (locly terminology)(project terminology)
- 20. locly platform: how it works
- 21. Metro-boulot-dodo • “create innovative cross artform work and we have produced an impressive catalogue of arts projects including installations, performances, interactive tours, visual art and new media, large scale spectacle and loads of site specific heritage work” • Castle histories translated to stories: – High Court in Great Hall -> Green Bicycle Murder trial audio performance; Oral histories with court staff/workers – Castle as home to Kings and other VIPs: historian researcher game experience
- 22. Leicester Castle tours Green Bicycle Court Audio Family Trail Historical Timeline Architecture Trail Beacon range Point of interest in room Point of interest in room Point of interest in room Whole room Whole room Guidance level & approach Prescriptive; audio instructions Free roam; audio instructions Prescriptive; text/graphic instructions Free roam; no instructions Free roam; no instructions Interpretation approach Emotive audio-based dramatisation Oral histories Treasure hunt, content (text and graphics) rewards Timeline- based content (text and graphics) Unstructured list of architectural features, content in text / graphics / audio Appeals to Visitors in groups Group of adults Families with children Families with children Group of adults
- 23. Part III: Why we built it that way
- 24. Visitor Research & Evaluation • Stage 1 – 70 visitor questionnaires – 70 potential visitor questionnaires – 130 visitors observed in courtrooms • Stage 2 – 60 visitor questionnaires – 3 Heuristic evaluations • Stage 3 – 113 visitor pre- post visit questionnaires; app logs
- 25. • Development & Evaluation Framework: putting visitors at the centre – Impact on visitors’ perceptions of • Learning • Enjoyment • Environment – Information – Activities – Learning opportunities – Impact on visitors’ use & engagement with space • Length of stay • Pattern of stops at points of interest Visitor Research & Evaluation Front-end evaluation App version 1 Formative evaluation App version 2 Formative evaluation Final app Summative evaluation
- 26. Part IV: What we found out (research findings)
- 27. Visitor perceptions of learning “How much did you learn about the Castle during your visit?” z-Test App users Non- users Mean 4.02 3.21 Known Variance 1.22 1.14 Observations 113 70 z 4.88 P(Z<=z) two-tail 1.05E-06 z Critical two-tail 1.96
- 28. Visitor perceptions of enjoyment “Overall, how enjoyable was your visit to the Castle?” z-Test App users Non- users Mean 4.44 3.94 Known Variance 0.85 1.03 Observations 113 70 z 3.35 P(Z<=z) two-tail 0.000807 z Critical two-tail 1.96
- 29. Visitor perceptions of environment “How would you rate your experience of: available information; available activities; learning opportunities?”
- 30. Visitor length of stay Declared time of start and time of end of visit
- 31. All 3 tours that utilised beacons at physical point of interest scored better than tours that didn’t Interactive guides (unordered list or timeline-based) scored worse than other interpretation approaches All tours were considered at least ‘OK’ by all visitors Beacon vs non-beacon tours
- 32. Beacon vs non-beacon tours
- 33. What we’re learning from: visit motives
- 34. Part IV: What we learned (experiential findings)
- 35. Generating Content for Beacons • Walking interviews (Evans & Jones, 2011) • Situated oral histories • Story building blocks
- 36. Mapping visitor movement Clerk desk (2) Judge seat (1) Dock (7) Jury box (5) Witness box (3)Public seats (at back) (4) Barristers (6) Pre-app
- 37. Built-in Content Evaluation • Does this piece of audio work here? • Is this combination of image and text acceptable? • Is this video too long, too short, or just right?
- 38. Conclusion • Beacon-based interpretation beneficial for learning and enjoyment, and increases positive perception of the site as learning environment • Potential of beacon logs to understand impact on visitor use of space; to inform development; to evaluate offer • We design for learning-oriented visitors, but it is the socially-oriented visitors who are more keen app adopters • Technology confidence not a prerequisite for effective use • Big potential: linking with other culture/heritage offers • Big concern: user privacy
- 39. Questions? For more information contact: Giasemi Vavoula, gv18@le.ac.uk (Academic Lead) Sally Coleman, Sally.Coleman@leicester.gov.uk (Arts Lead) Rhys Jones, rhys@locly.com (Technical Lead) Links Leicester Castle Tells its Story – report: http://tinyurl.com/zbmaa59 Leicester Castle Tells its Story – website: http://tinyurl.com/qfwa2ws Locly: http://locly.com/ Museum Studies: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies Metro-Boulot-Dodo: http://www.metro-boulot-dodo.com/
Editor's Notes
- The Leicester Castle app can be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store – search for ‘Leicester Castle’. Note that, due to size, the Android app has two parts, ‘Leicester Castle Discover’ and ‘Leicester Castle Interact’. The app is best experienced onsite, however, it can be used off site using the manual playlist. Using outside Leicester Castle will not give you the full beacon experience, but will give you a taste of the content and interpretation approaches.
- Welcome to this Museum Tech session on iBeacons and how they can be used to bring sites to life. I am a lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and I will talk about a project we did with Leicester Arts and Museums Service, with technology partner Locly, and with content developers Metro-Boulot—Dodo at Leicester Castle last year.
- A little bit of context to Leicester Castle, a Grade I listed building with a medieval Great Hall that contains two mid-Victorian courtrooms. It has a rich and varied history having been used to host Parliament on several occasions and the visits of various kings, including King Richard III. The courtrooms have been witness to many trials including the notorious Green Bicycle Murder Trial in the 1920s. J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was a court reporter here. It is a complex building to interpret but has plenty of fascinating stories to tell.
- The Castle opens 10 times a year for Heritage Sunday events, which take place once a month from Feb to Nov. Prior to the project, the only historical interpretation for casual visitors was an A4 information sheet – there were no regular permanent staff to provide tours or commentary on its history. Most visitors were leaving the building unaware of its rich and important history and so improvements had to be made to historical interpretation. Traditional interpretation methods such as information panels were impractical due to the courtroom furniture and employing human guides for the time it was open to the public was too costly.
- We had the Castle and its unmet interpretation needs; we also had a brand new technology the potential of which needed exploring. Bluetooth Low Energy beacons are little devices that have a unique ID each. They use Bluetooth to transmit their unique ID to the world. And, being low energy, they can do this for a very long time before their batteries run out – typically from a few months to a few years. So basically they will sit there and regularly cry out ‘hey there, I’m beacon A’. So in themselves, they do nothing particularly exciting. But interesting things happen when a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled mobile device passes by and the device’s beacon app hears the beacon’s cries: the app can then use the beacon’s ID as filter, or as a condition variable, to fetch a certain piece of content or interactivity to the user. For this to happen the user need not do anything, other than having enabled Bluetooth on the device to start with and run the app. When they walk into the beacon’s range, their device with fetch and display content and/or interactivity automatically. If all that content sits in the app and the app is already installed on the user’s device, there is not even need for a Wi-Fi or a data connection. And if you’re wondering what that range is, it is customisable and can range from a few centimetres to several meters. In fact, you can in principle layer the app’s reaction according to range – at 5 meters, show content A; at 1 meter, show content B; at 30cm, offer interactivity A. You could even observe the length of the user’s stay within the beacon’s range and use that to layer content presentation: as soon as they enter, present a short outline; if 20 seconds later they are still there, present some more detail; if 45 second later they are still there, present all the detail. Importantly, you can also program the app to log the user’s trajectory by recording information about the beacons it encounters and the actions it takes. So at the end, you can have a quite detailed account of what the user did in the space. So with the right app, a rather boring beacon can offer exciting visitors experiences.
- Just to summarise what you need, it is BLE beacons, a beacon app, a BLE device to run the app, and a content and beacon management system to store all the content and beacon ID and location information.
- We had a problem, the under-interpreted Castle; we had a technology to explore, the beacons; and we had the opportunity to bring the two together with funding from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, a fund supported by Nesta, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, HLF and Arts Council England. Projects funded under this scheme bring together an arts organisation, a technology company and an academic organisation which in our project were Leicester City Council’s Arts and Museums Service, who were the project lead; Locly, who were the Technical partner, and the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester as Academic parnter. Our project also included a content developer, Metro-Boulot-Dodo, who brought extensive experience in the design of engaging heritage experiences.
- And this was our point of departure, a desire to understand how BLE beacons might help to encourage visitors to enjoy, appreciate and value this important city centre heritage building. And dozens other historical buildings and venues in similar situations.
- Using Locly´s platform, an app was developed that offered a series of trails for the courtrooms. 30 beacons were placed in or under court furniture to identify specific points of interest that visitors had to reach to access location-specific content, for example the dock or the reporters’ bench. A single beacon could trigger content on whichever trail the visitor was following on their device. We used blue-tack to discretely secure the beacons to furniture.
- The trails used different interpretation techniques. The Green Bicycle Murder Trail is an audio tour that presents an emotive and immersive dramatisation of this infamous court trial that took place at Leicester Castle in the 1920s, almost like a radio play with actor´s voices, music and sound effects. Visitors are directed to specific locations in the criminal court to hear the court clerk open proceedings, the judge summing up, the accused in the dock giving his plea or the jury on the bench giving their verdict, all in the actual locations the trial was delivered from. This tour has to be followed in sequence and audio instructions are given throughout.
- The Court Audio Trail presents oral histories from people who used to work in the courts until 1992, again in the locations the material relates to for example reporters talk about carving their names into the press bench and former police officers talk about the noise and activity in the cells beneath the courts. Oral histories were recorded “in situ” which helped with recall and ensured content was linked to location. This tour enables visitors to roam the court rooms freely until an ibeacon triggers content on their mobile device. Audio instruction is minimal.
- One of the things that was really lacking at Leicester Castle Great Hall was a family offer. The family trail invited young visitors with their carers to explore the court rooms to discover points of interest in order to unlock historical content. The approach adopted was a task and reward model, like a treasure hunt. Once the location had been found, the beacon would trigger an activity – a matching game, maze, or interactive – and upon successful completion it would present a “reward” of additional historical content. The Locly platform supports lots of interactive widgets which were ideal for this purpose. Here two girls can be seen removing a car park surface to reveal King Richard III´s remains. All “rewards” relate to the historical content.
- We also created two interactive guidebooks which explained the historical context to the Castle and pointed out features of architectural interest. Information was layered so visitors could discover as much, or as little, about the castle as they wanted. Audio clips were embedded of historians pointing out features like Norman windows or the Georgian brick front to the medieval timbered hall, again recorded in situ. Locly widgets were also included such as this picture swipe interactive which helped visitors visualize what the Great Hall might have looked like in medieval times compared to the same location today. Originally the intention was just to provide historical information about the Great Hall using iBeacons but much of the historical information was general and not location specific. In the two interactive guidebooks the beacons just trigger them as visitors enter the courtrooms, following which there is no other interaction between the device and any of the beacons in the room.
- The project was completed in three stages. The first stage focused mainly on understanding our visitors and our potential visitors and their needs, and how they currently use the space of the Castle. We also turned to the literature for guidance on interpreting historic buildings. And we did content research, including historical consultancy and oral histories. The second stage was an iterative process that included the development of a version of the app, its evaluation with Castle visitors during the heritage Sunday, then development of next app version integrating findings from the visitor evaluation. The final stage included release of the final version of the app on iOS and Android, and summative evaluation with visitors during July’s Heritage Sunday and the city festival in August.
- We used Locly as our development platform. Locly is a beacon management platform that enables users to set up beacons in specific locations, and associate with them a range of content items in a range of content types. This content can then be delivered to beacon-compatible devices as visitors walk around a site. A few months before our project started locly had piloted a beacon app at the National Slate Museum in Wales. Their platform offered the possibility of integrating tours within their culture beacon app, which meant no app development costs. And conveniently, the app works both on Android and iOS. Importantly, Locly offers access to a sandpit where developers can experiment and push further than the limits of the platform. That meant that we had the option of dealing with whatever particularities emerged from the specific project, and locly could work towards expanding the platform’s functionality to support such features later on. For a project that had, for various reasons, to be completed within six months, this proved critical.
- Locly have a series of detailed tutorials on their website, as do other ibeacon vendors and platforms, so I will not go through a detailed demonstration how to build a tour with the locly platform here. But just to give you an idea of what developing beacon-based tours involves, and a rough translation of the Castle app into locly’s terminology and functionality, let me briefly talk through this diagram: At the top of the structure on the development platform are ‘Projects’. One way to think about this is as corresponding to the site as a whole. For each project you can then define ‘Places’. These may correspond for example to different beacon-based tours. The next step is to associate a series of cards with each place. Cards are items of content or items of interaction, for example a piece of audio or text, or a questionnaire. The final step is to associate cards with actual beacons. As you can see from my rough diagram here a place can have more than one cards associated with it, i.e. a tour can include several items of content. And each card, i.e. each item of content, is assigned a beacon, so the content is displayed at specific physical locations. But each beacon can be assigned to more than items of content, so the same beacon can be used in different tours. This enabled us for example to deliver different pieces of content when a visitor was near the Judge’s seat depending on which tour they were doing.
- Creating any of these items, a project, a place, a card, is a matter of filling in a form like this. And you can do this straight from your tablet, as the platform is available as an app as well as through a desktop browser.
- To make all this technology work, the main ingredient needed is content. There was lots in the Castle’s history, but little in terms of available content that could be repurposed for the beacon tours. We knew that from the beginning, so we involved a creative art studio, Metro-boulot-dodo, who were tasked with translating the Castle’s various histories into a series of engaging stories. And that is just what they did, with the dramatisation of the Green Bicycle Murder trial, the series of oral history interviews with ex court workers, and the design of a family game based on the metaphor of a historian-researcher.
- So this is how the Castle’s five tours and trails were built each to tell a story related to a different part or aspect of the Castle’s history. And each of these stories was told differently, making different use of the same set of 30 beacons. Three of the tours used beacons to identify specific points of interest in the room, while the other two used them only to identify which courtroom the visitor was in. Two tours gave visitors specific guidance where in the room to go next, while the other three allowed visitors to roam freely guided by interest, curiosity or serendipity. Each tour took a different approach to interpretation. And different tours appealed to different visitor groups.
- Central to developing the tours and trails in that way was our growing understanding of the Castle visitors and their needs. Visitor research and evaluation were important in this process, and started early on, before tour development started. We did surveys with visitors to the Castle, with visitors to other sites in Leicester who represented part of our potential visitor base, and we observed visitors’ movements in the two courtrooms. Later on, in the second stage, we trialled the first and second versions of the app and did some more surveys with app users this time, which helped us understand how well the app was being received and what needed improvement. In the final stage we did a summative evaluation with 113 visitors who used the final version of the app.
- Throughout the project we used a development and evaluation framework that focused our effort on the visitor experience, particularly how the introduction of the app impacts visitor perceptions of learning and enjoyment, and of the Castle more generally as an environment for learning. And also how it impacts visitors’ use and engagement with the space in terms of dwell time (how long they stay), and how they navigate the space, where they stop, in what sequence, etc. We were then able to feed evaluation findings into each development cycle, and adjust the evaluation methods and tools to respond to the developing needs of the project.
- We used a 5-point Likert scale to measure visitors’ perceptions of learning. The graph at the bottom left illustrates that visitor perceptions of learning move up the scale when they use the app, as a much higher proportion of app users say that they learned a great deal or many things, compared with non-users. A two independent samples z-test confirmed that there is much less than half percent chance that this observation was coincidental.
- Findings for perceptions of enjoyment are similar. Note that here we had an even harder job, as the vast majority of visitors were already reporting that they had a good time. With the app however, the vast majority is now reporting an excellent time.
- Looking at visitor perceptions of the Castle as a learning environment and how they rate available information, activities, and learning opportunities: the app is having a positive impact on all three, with more spectacular effects on ratings of available activities and learning opportunities – as mentioned earlier, there was little available for visitors to do and learn from before the app.
- The app has also had an overall positive impact on dwell time: visitors who used the app stayed on the site much longer. The difference is striking for lone visitors, who stayed twice as long with the app as they did without the app.
- As explained earlier, not all tours on the app made full use of the beacons. And what I have presented so far is the impact of the app overall. But how do beacon-based tours compare with non-beacon tours? As you can see, app users rated the three beacon tours higher than the non-beacon tours: the Green Bicycle came top, followed by the Family Trail, followed by the Court Audio. The two more traditional interactive guide tours, the Historical Timeline and Architecture Trail, got the lowest ratings. But what happens when visitors do beacon-based tours only, or non-beacon tours only?
- This is what happens. Here we have segmented the app users into three groups. The beacon group did any combination of the Green Bicycle, the Court Audio and Family Trail; the non-beacon group did any combination of the Historical timeline and Architecture Trail, and the mixed group did any combination of all five tours. Both beacon and non-beacon groups did an average of 1.3 tours, while the mixed group did an average of 3 tours. What we’re seeing here is the beacon group reporting higher levels of learning and much higher levels of enjoyment than the non-beacon group. Also, the beacon group stayed on average almost 50% longer than the non-beacon group. Interestingly the mixed group has outperformed both the beacon and the non-beacon groups in terms of learning, but sits somewhere in the middle in terms of enjoyment. This however should be expected: each of the five tours tells a different Castle story, presents a different part of its history. You will find the odd cross-reference, but there is no content overlap. So the more tours you do the more content you are exposed to, and so all tours have a cumulative effect on learning: the more tours you do, the more you learn. With enjoyment it seems that things are different however, as adding non-beacon tours to the mix seems to be taking away from visitor enjoyment.
- I will close the findings part of the talk with a couple more general findings. The two samples, app users and non-users, were demographically very similar. The main difference we found between the two is in their motives for visiting, as a considerably higher proportion of app users cited social reasons for visiting – for example, to spend a day out with friends and family. This suggests that visitors with a more socially-oriented visit agenda, were more likely to opt in for the app trial. In fact, socially-oriented visitors agree or strongly agree in much higher proportions that they are likely to use mobile interpretation on a future heritage visit. This is important because we might design with learning-oriented visitors in mind, but it turns out that actually it is the socially-oriented visitors who are more likely to use it. Interestingly though, when we look at how learning-oriented and socially-oriented visitors benefit from using the app, it turns out that the learning-oriented visitors benefit more, both in terms of learning and in terms of enjoyment. This is also important: learning-oriented visitors must be made aware that picking up a mobile device and using a heritage app will actually benefit their learning agenda.
- We tried different methods and approaches to generating geolocative content: a variation of the ‘walking interviews’ method, where Metro interviewed our historian consultant on location; and situated oral histories, as Metro conducted the oral history interviews with the Castle workers inside the Castle. Note that even in-situ interviews may end up yielding content that is too generic (most of the material from the historian interviews ended up in the two interactive guidebooks for this reason). Finding ways to keep the elicited information location specific can be challenging, but is also crucial. We have since also being experimenting with techniques for building stories based on historical content and information. In the photograph you can see a Museum Studies student presenting her group’s ‘story building blocks’ exercise at the Magazine in Leicester. Each block is assigned a piece of content, then is ‘dropped’ on the location where a beacon would trigger it. The colour and size of the block can be used to simulate which story it belongs to and what content type it is. Walking around the building to collect blocks can simulate the visitor experience of the mobile storytelling.
- I mentioned earlier that our initial visitor research included visitor observations. We noted visitor movement in each courtroom, points of interest where they stopped for more than a few seconds, number of such stops in each room, and in what order these points were visited. We mapped this data onto the room to identify potential hotspots for the beacons. This kind of data can potentially be very useful, not only for building tours that reflect the visitors’ natural movement but also, for example in busier sites, for responsive management of visitor traffic. In our case we only used this data to find out the points that interest visitors most. What you see here is a hand-made diagrammatic representation. What we were unable to explore in this project is the potential of the beacon app itself to record this movement data. We hope to build this into follow on research, and look into potential visualisations of movement data that can inform beacon placement and feed into ‘live’ traffic management.
- Logs of movement and beacon engagement is not the only type of evaluation data that can be collected through a beacon app. The locly platform for example supports survey forms as one type of interaction, and these can be used either to easily collect visitor feedback at the end of the visit; or to collect quick, short responses regarding a particular content item, for example to test how they perceive the length of a video, the quality of a piece of audio, the readability of a page with text and graphics. Such feedback can be valuable at development time, or for collecting visitor feedback about specific programmes or activities, or more generally for visitor research.