Multi-touch Rocks: Playing with Tangible Virtual Heritage in the Museum -- First User Tests

Abstract

More than 50.000 petroglyphs are engraved in rock panels on the flanks of the UNESCO world heritage site Val Camonica (Northern Italy). The engravings are not always visible and are often on steep slopes on which it is forbidden to walk for conservation reasons. To overcome these problems, and to be able to transfer the rock art experience to other places, we designed a collaborative computer game for a multi-touch tabletop display. The game contains the image of a full rock panel and several mini games to be played on the panel. This short paper describes the game design as well as the interface and interaction design. We focus on the evaluation of the user interface as an important step in the user centered design approach. Consequently, we perform first user tests on the game in order to evaluate effectivity and efficiency of the user interface. The tests achieve largely good results.