Digital technologies in heritage sites and museums are generally understood to be screen-based and more recently applications for the visitors’ phone. Such digitally augmented visits, however, take away the materiality of the collection - and the embodied experience that is key to a deeper engagement and appreciation. The rise of the ‘Internet of Things’ supports the seamless imbedding of sensors and actuators within objects and spaces. In this way technology disappears giving way to a direct emotional connection with heritage and/or objects. While these new visiting experiences can be designed, the validation of their effectiveness remained. This paper discusses a comparative study with 76 participants using an app on a mobile phone, a smart card and a smart replica while visiting an exhibition. The replicas and the cards were both tangible, but the replicas had an aesthetic value the smart cards did not. Visitors’ preferences (collected via a questionnaire) and observed behaviours were analysed in depth.

This study is the first to offer a possible definitive answer to questions that have been asked for the past 10 years on the distracting effect of mobile devices in museums and the assumptions that younger visitors would prefer technology while older generations would resist it. This research was further disseminated at the ACM CHI Conference on Human-Factors in Computing Systems 2018 receiving an Honourable Mention, and underpinned Petrelli’s keynote speech “Beyond the Phone: Mobile CH in the age of IoT” at MobileCH - Mobile Cultural Heritage in 2018 at ACM Mobile HCI. It also formed part of her keynote speech “From Delivering Facts to Generating Emotions: The Complex Relationship between Museums and Information” at ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) in 2019.