In general terms, adaptivity is the capacity to adjust to changes in the environment. In Information Technology, the term is often intended in a more restricted sense as the capacity of a system to provide users with information in a way that best suites their needs. We focused on the particular type of adaptation consisting in tailoring information presentation and we investigated the scenario of mobile access to cultural heritage sites.
Museums are excellent testbeds for the development and testing of innovative technologies for personalized delivery of information based on: location awareness; user modeling and integration of vision and speech (input and output).
They also provide the opportunity to test affective interfaces in a suitable environment.
The PEACH project (Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage) has been a large endeavor concerned with developing a novel integrated framework for museum visits. We have taken up the challenge of developing various intelligent technologies and assembling them into a coherent picture to support and improve visitor interaction and satisfaction.
The main idea has been to produce a multifaceted system that accompanies the visitor and augments her overall museum experience. Our guiding principles are that the technology that accomplishes this must not be obtrusive, that nothing should come between the visitor and the exhibit and that the emotion of being there in front of the real thing ought to be fully preserved and if possible enhanced even further.
The PEACH experience has been collected in an edited volume that will be shortly published in the Springer's Cognitive Technologies Series.
We conducted a number of user studies to evaluate the ideas underlying the many components of our adaptive museum guides. In particular, we investigated how personality traits selectively affect the attitudes of people towards adaptivity, especially those relating to the notion of control (see Goren-Bar et al., 2006).
We are also developing an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model of technologies for mobile access of adaptive information
Research on mobile information presentation is now progressing in collaboration with The Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Foundation Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science (CRI) at the University of Haifa in Israel.