ARCHIE is a research project in which the educational staff of the Gallo-Roman Museum collaborates with the Human-Computer Interaction research group of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) in the context of the expansion of the museum. The starting point of this interdisciplinary collaboration is our strong belief that handheld guides are a promising medium to enhance visitors' learning experiences in a museum and strengthen the experience of a group visit.In this paper we present a first application: a collaborative trading game for (school)groups of children; from conceptual stage towards final implementation and conclude with user test results. We designed the museum game so that every player is dependent on the concrete actions of other players; only through social interaction and cooperation can they come to a good result.

During a museum visit, social interaction can improve intellectual, social, personal and cultural development. With the advances in technology, the use of personal mobile handheld devices – such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) – that replace the traditional paper guidebooks is becoming a common sight at various heritage sites all over the world. This technology often leads to problems such as isolating visitors from their companions and distracting visitors away from their surroundings. We believe careful design of mobile applications and taking advantage of low-cost networking infrastructure can avoid such isolation of the visitor from his or her surroundings and encourage interaction with both surroundings and companions. In this paper, we describe our approach to create a mobile handheld guide that supports the learning process by exploiting social interaction between visitors and subtly matching the content and concepts shown on the hand- held guide with what can be found in the museum.

This paper describes a framework to enable implicit interaction between mobile users in order to establish and maintain social networks according to the preferences and needs of each individual. A user model is proposed which can be constructed by the user and appended with information regarding the user's privacy preferences. Design choices and tool support regarding the framework are discussed.

We present ARCHIE, an interdisciplinary research project of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) and the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren (Province of Limburg) which aims to discover how a handheld guide can be used to enhance the museum learning experience. Because we stress on the important role of social interaction as a prerequisite for intellectual, social, personal and cultural development, one of the main objectives of the ARCHIE project is to encourage and stimulate interaction with the museum, the PDA and fellow visitors. Designing for interaction however asks for a mental switch. At this point, we developed a first application: a collaborative trading game.

We present ARCHIE, a research project which aims to discover how handheld guides can be used as powerful instruments to enhance the visitor's learning experience. Although mobile devices are becoming a common aid to support a museum visit, they often lead to an individualized experience. However, most people do not visit a museum alone, and recent research has pointed out that social interaction is a prerequisite for an intensified and improved learning process. To accommodate the shortcomings in many of the current solutions, we are designing a platform that enables us to create a socially-aware handheld guide that stimulates interaction between group members. They can communicate with each other either directly (by voice) or indirectly (by collaborative games) by means of their mobile guides. Besides the aforementioned communication possibilities, handheld guides can also provide a way to present per- sonalized content. By using a personal profile, it is possible to adapt the interface and tailor the information to the needs and interests of every visitor. The combination of personalized content and interfaces, communication channels between visitors in the same group and support for localization might lead to an innovative mobile guide that integrates with the museum as well as with other visitors. Our platform enables social, and, in many cases, playful interactions with other visitors in the same group. At the same time the context-awareness (proximity and personalization) increases the involvement of the visitor with the content presented in the museum.

In a firefighter emergency mission it is essential for the members of a fire brigade to get an intelligent and reliable overview of the complete situation, presented according to the role of each member. In this paper we report on the design and development of a system to support a fire brigade on site with a set of mobile services that offers a role-based focus+context user interface. It provides the required overview over the emergency situation according to the user task and context, while life-saving information is emphasized. The implementation of a context-rule-based decision module enhances the visualization of required information. Interaction with the user interface is designed for use in the wild; which in this case comes down to providing a "fat finger" interface that allows firemen to interact with the user interface on site with his gloves on.