We are Linda Hirsch and Christian Mall from the LMU Munich in Germany and also on behalf of our
supervisor, Prof. Andreas Butz, we’d like to present our project called “Do Touch This:
Turning a Plaster Bust Into a Tangible Interface”. The project was conducted in collaboration with
the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich. Plaster busts are common exhibition
pieces in museums, but they usually are off-limits for touch to prevent any damages or signs of wear.
However, the lacking touch interaction leads to a loss of information about the
art of sculpting itself and reduces the visitor experience. Through touching an
art object, users get a sense of the object’s three-dimensionality and its surface details.
People can even get a feeling of the artistic craft that lies within the making of a bust.
In our work, we explored the making and user experience of an interactive bust
in continuous collaboration with a curator and a sculptor from the museum.
Current research is still very limited considering interactive statues or busts. One example we found
is the project by Capurro et al. 2015 who created a scaled down interactive replica of a statue made
from a different material and thus not representing the three-dimentional, architectural properties of the original.
Overall, we could find only little research on full-size interactive busts,
even though their shape and material qualities tell a lot about their epoch and craftsmanship
of their respective making time. We addressed the gap in an iterative, exploratory approach,
involving 3 design iterations. The first iteration included requirements gathering through interviews
with the museum curator and the sculptor who gave us an introduction to his craft, making techniques,
and the materials. They also provided us with a plaster bust of Ludwig I, a former Bavarian king.
While exploring the conductivity of the materials, we also conducted a lab study with 12 participants
to identify preferred touchpoints and gestures. To track the touchpoints we used watercolors and
we took calibrated pictures after each trial using a wooden contraption and blended the
images in a graphics editor afterwards to identify the main overlaps as shown in the right picture.
We selected 4 themes in collaboration with the curator and asked participants which part of the
bust they would rather relate to each topic. The nose and the hair were participants' preferred
touchpoints. Other popular parts included the lips, the temple, and the forehead.
Based on the results, we decided to embed capacitive sensors at the according places.
In the next prototyping iteration, we aimed at creating a new, augmented bust replica.
We used copper foil as capacitive sensors as it can easily be adapted to different bust features.
We are not going into detail here but we also created a git project with details
for the maker community. As the last step in this iteration, we decided to mark the
interactive areas on the surface of the bust using watercolors to not alter the surface texture.
For the third design iteration we connected the bust to visual and auditive output
using a small speaker and an e-ink display and tested the prototype in situ in the Staatliche
Antikensammlungen with 20 participants. We asked them to explore the prototype on
their own and asked questions about their experience using a 5-point-Likert scale
and semi-structured interviews. Here’s a short clip of a participant interacting with the bust.
[Translated from German:] After the independence of Greece got acknowledged officially
at the London Conference of 1832, prince Otto from Bavaria,
Ludwig’s second born son, became the king of Greece.
We found out that in general, participants found the output to be satisfactory and suitable and
also think that interactive busts enhance the visitor experience. Participants found it “new,
interesting, memorable, and informative” as well as “easier to remember” information
because of the “unusual experience”. Besides it being a novel and engaging experience, it also
connected participants more with the art due to the more intensified and amplified experience.
In short, we kept essential surface qualities of the art object, which enabled the interaction with
the bust’s “communicative membrane”. Participants also found the interaction with the bust to be
fun and memorable. And the tangible interaction fostered the experience of haptic intricacies,
such as the draping of the bust's hair or the eyebrow's curved line, both indicators of the
bust's original making period. Our results suggest that interactive busts support a museum’s goal of
offering novel and engaging interactions, making the visitors’ museum experience more interesting
compared to already established interactive interfaces such as audio guides. We believe
that this topic is worth further exploration and hope to spark a discussion about the potential
of turning busts into tangible interfaces in museums and enriching the art of sculpting.
We thank you for your attention and we are looking forward to your questions.