Interactive Media Division
USC School of Cinematic Arts
February 13, 2007
Physical awareness of our existence at a specific place and time is a powerful tool to manipulate for engaging history education. Drawing from the worlds of museum exhibition, costuming, and physical computing, Fitting In is an installation piece which hosts a physically immersive experience whose goal is to cause the visitor to feel empathy with people from the past by wearing a restrictive historical outfit and experimenting with various physical activities. This experience is facilitated by sensors and audiovisual feedback in a location-based pervasive learning environment.
Keywords:
Clothing, Costume, Education, Experience, History, Immersive, Movement, Pervasive Learning, Physicality, Physical Computing, Smart Environment, Somatic, Temporal, Wearable
Main Body:
I. Introduction & Concept 'You know the year, the day and the month, for literally millions of reasons: because the blanket you woke up under this morning may have been partially synthetic...Because red and green lights signaled when you might cross a street on your way here this morning; and because the soles of the shoes you walked in are a synthetic that will outlast leather...Because the front page of the Times looked precisely as it did this morning and as it never will again or ever has before. And because millions and millions and millions of still other such facts will confront you all day long...The list is endless, all of it a part of your own consciousness and of the common consciousness. And it binds you as it binds us all to the day and to the very moment when precisely that list and only that list is possible. You never escape it...' Jack Finney, Time and Again
We are all citizens of a specific moment in time. Without speaking or even opening our eyes, we can feel it. The physicality of the present is permeating, engaging, and effortless to us. In the study of history we often strive to understand people and events in time periods and places from which we are incredibly removed. In many cases the only remaining proofs of their existence are words on a page and still, stylized images, but those people and events had just as much physical presence as we do today. Recreating somatic experiences of the past is tremendously powerful and builds both deeper understanding of that time period and exciting new possibilities for the future of education.
Until recently, these experiences were most commonly found in living history sites, where civilians from the present can visit a large staff of reenactors who immerse themselves in a life-size reconstruction of a location in the past and assume the daily tasks, rituals, clothing, and food of that period. Now traditional education venues such as museums, schools, and theaters push towards more interactive and engaging communication techniques, while computers and technology push towards more responsive and invisible "smart" environments. These worlds have already combined to build exciting projects in science and art education, and there is enormous potential in the realm of history education.
Fitting In is an installation piece which hosts a somatic history experience through the use of costume and a physical computing environment. The costumes are built to make the user feel what it would have been like to actually wear the clothes of the period, rather than simply look like they are wearing them. Visitors of both genders are able to wear period outfits for either gender. The exhibit space has embedded sensors that, when triggered, prompt visitors to experiment with a range of physical activities appropriate to the period. One goal of using this technology is to demonstrate the potential of a smart environment to facilitate immersive history education without the need of extensive locations or live staff.
This project focuses on costume as a starting point for the visitor's physical interaction with a historical period. The simplest reason for this is that clothing is the central object with which we have intimate physical experience every day of our entire lives. The action of changing our clothes drives an immediate reassessment of the state of our bodies and how we are able to move and express ourselves while wearing them. In addition, clothing is a form of nonverbal communication with the outside world, and therefore so is the physical movement that our clothing produces from us. Directly tied to this is our social communication through the nonverbal manners and customs of our culture.
The current iteration of Fitting In presents a street and interior household scene in America from the Antebellum period of the 1850's and 1860's. The clothing from this period is significantly different from contemporary clothing for both genders, and presents interesting physical challenges to a modern audience. In addition, this period saw manners and societal customs in America become more codified and more communicative, , allowing for more mental puzzles and analysis to be built into the visitor experience.
II. Prior Art
Fitting In combines elements from the worlds of history education, museum and location-based entertainment design, clothing and fashion, and physical computing. Each of these areas present important works and trends that give insight as to how this project can be an effective and interesting addition to the field of interactive exhibition and education.
There are many costume museums around the world that have permanent exhibitions centered around large historical collections of gorgeous clothing. Although there is a growing trend at these venues toward more innovative and interactive exhibits, these museums mainly display their pieces on featureless mannequins in static scenes behind thick glass (Fig. 1). While this setting can be visually stimulating and best preserves the costumes, it presents an enormous barrier for the visitor trying to understand what it would feel like to wear such clothing.
Fig. 1: The Museum of Costume in Bath, UK
Broader museums who have already adopted interactive design into their exhibits are starting to offer interesting costume installations.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center recently had a week of workshops where children could dress up as one of four people from the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. At the Everson Museum, the Children’s Interactive Gallery asks young visitors to look at historical and modern portraits and then dress up with various costumes and props to sit for their own portrait. The Musée de la Civilisation in Québec City has had a costume room for many years, and recently transformed it into a miniature medieval city where families and school groups can dress up and perform daily village tasks (Fig. 2).
Make Way for the Middle Ages
Fitting In will take a different direction from each of these pieces because visitors are to act as themselves trying to blend in with Antebellum America, rather than role-play a particular historical figure. Also, the costumes of the project are constructed to feel as accurate as possible (given the design and exhibition constraints) rather than simply look accurate in a mirror.
Living history and reenactments are fascinating, but require large numbers of cast members and generally treat visitors as spectators rather than participants. Even when an event calls for audience participation in physical activity, the visitor usually remains in her own, modern Fig. 2: Make Way for the Middle Ages clothing. This cuts the meaningfulness of the experience in half: the visitor still has not had the chance to feel what that activity would have felt like to the people who had to perform it in the past because she felt the restrictions of modern clothing rather than period clothing while performing it. Fitting In aims to provide an immersive, interactive setting without requiring a large, live cast of actors or docents.
Fig. 3: Audience as spectator: the Fortress of Louisbourg living history site in Nova Scotia, Canada.
From the arena of clothing and fashion, design companies are starting to rethink the purpose and features of dressing rooms in stores. IDEO created a dressing room for Prada that gives the customer the ability to control the opacity and reflectivity of the glass walls, to delay his reflection so as to see himself from all different angles, and also uses RFID tagging to display runway footage of the clothing items and to suggest different colors, styles, and accessories.
Fig. 4: METRO Group's Smart Dressing Room
METRO Group’s Future Store also involves tagging and plays with the customer’s reflection to show what he would look like in different variations of the products he has chosen to try on. While these approaches are useful extensions of our current shopping model, they all focus on the display of clothing and how the customer looks (or should want to look) while wearing it. These projects are METRO Group's Smart Dressing Room useful examples of tagging and technical design, but they do not address conveying to the customer how it physically feels to wear the clothes.
On the technical side, the fields of pervasive learning and physical computing show through numerous projects and conferences that they understand their potential impact on education and learning methods. Much of their focus thus far has been on the use of mobile devices to make information and experiences available to the individual, or on rethinking our conception of a classroom using networked communities and e-learning. Projects that use pervasive learning and physical computing to facilitate specific areas of education tend to focus either on math and science investigations, or artistic and poetic expression. , Using these technologies for history education experiences other than mobile information access (e.g. audio tours) has yet to be broadly investigated.
Museums, costume, and pervasive learning all utilize tools with which history can be conceptualized, taught, and learned in new and engaging ways. Fitting In presents an immersive experience that uses some of these tools to inspire visitors to engage with the past on a personal, physical level.
III. Fitting In: Project Description
A. The Narrative Experience
The entrance area to Fitting In presents the narrative premise for the piece: the fictional Temporal Displacement Agency is looking for new time traveling agents to send back in time to observe America during the Antebellum period. The exhibit is presented as an introductory training facility, where visitors will be asked to tailor their posture, movements, and manners to blend in with the general public of the 1860's. The exhibit itself is masked from general view by a wall or curtain, allowing visitors to avoid an undesired audience during their training experience. When a visitor decides to enter the exhibit, an attendant welcomes her and asks her to choose which role (male or female) she would like to try out. The visitor decides and is escorted to a dressing area.
While the visitor is assisted by the attendant into her costume pieces, she is given a brief audiovisual introduction to the Antebellum period, including current events, trends, issues, and protocol. When the briefing has finished the visitor enters the main area of the exhibit, which is set up with props to present a city street from the 1860's. As the visitor proceeds down the street, she encounters a series of obstacles. Some are simply physical challenges, such as stepping over a puddle, which are prompted by the navigation of the set. There are also social challenges, such as knowing when to remove a hat or gloves, which are prompted by audio tracks triggered by the visitor's location on the set. At the end of the street the visitor passes through a doorway and into an interior setting, where she discovers a dinner party and learns table protocol. At the conclusion of the interior scene, the visitor returns down the street to the dressing area. The entire experience takes five to ten minutes.
When the visitor reaches the dressing area, the attendant shows her a video that has been taken of her training experience and reminds her of the societal standards with which she was trying to blend. As the attendant helps her remove the costume, the visitor is again shown images of period scenes involving the clothing she just wore. The visitor is left with the question of whether she sees those people and their time period differently now that she has literally been “in their shoes.”
Fig. 5: Female and male evening wear in the Antebellum period
B. The Physical Design
The physical layout of Fitting In follows this general floor plan:
Fig. 6: Fitting In floor plan
The walls of the street are lined with large props appropriate to the setting (including carts, barrels, street lamps, etc.), and people on the street are represented by life-sized cutouts. For the interior set, the walls are painted with scenes from a dinner party and the visitor is presented with a table, chair, and set of dishes and silverware. At the head of the table is a video display where an animated character at dinner interacts with the visitor and guides her through a meal.
Both settings are outfitted with speakers which will deliver audio feedback and prompts to the visitor when triggered by her position or movements. These will be tracked by pressure sensors placed on the floor of the exhibit, as well as small props and costume pieces embedded with RFID tags. In addition to the physical and technological setup described above, Fitting In requires two costume piece sets (one male, one female) for the Antebellum time period. The male outfit features a jacket, collar and tie, pants, gloves, hat, cane, and boots, while the female outfit features a corset, crinoline, gloves, hat, purse, and heeled shoes. Both outfits are available in three different sizes to accommodate as wide a range of visitors as possible.
C. Results to Date
A demonstration version of Fitting In exhibited on December 7, 2007. It had a limited floor plan and was entirely human-facilitated.
Fig. 7: Demonstration Floor Plan/span>
Over the course of four hours, twenty visitors tried out the single costume available, which consisted of a corset and crinoline (hoop skirt). The attendant delivered background historical information to visitors as they were dressed, and then gave visitors three tasks to accomplish in the activity area: stepping over an obstacle, sitting on a stool, and picking small objects up from the ground. After the visitors performed the tasks and returned, the attendant critiqued their posture and manners.
While this prototype used a human attendant to play the part of the technological triggers and feedback that will exist in the final installation, the demonstration was highly successful in several areas. The privacy offered by the wall of the exhibit did encourage more visitors to try out the piece than if they were in plain view. Overall visitor reaction was very positive, and most visitors asked to try Fig. 8: A visitor tries on the prototype corset the course again. All those who did succeeded in correcting their movements. After initial fixation with their images in a mirror, all visitors were eager to move around and test the physicality of the costume. This confirms that people want more than visual feedback out of a costume experience; they want tactile feedback as well. Visitors did not disengage with the educational aspect of the project, and one visitor commented that the historical information was "actually very interesting." In addition to the conscious reactions of the visitors, there was one very important subconscious reaction that every visitor showed. While navigating the course away from the attendant, some visitors kept their elbows bent and their hands appropriately together at the waist, while other visitors swung their arms around in ordinary 21st Century fashion or in an attempt to keep their balance. However, when visitors carried the small objects back to the attendant, every single one – without prompting – carried them at their waist with their arms correctly adjusted. This reaction has important implications as to how behaviors can be facilitated by other means than explicit direction.
IV. Conclusion
Fitting In builds an immersive history experience on the exciting advances in the worlds of museum design and physical computing, adding the personal physicality of period clothing. Future iterations of this concept are exciting, both on a small and large scale. The Antebellum period offers many more extravagant physical activities to try, from ballroom dancing to battlefield maneuvers. On a broader level, physicality creates deep and meaningful experiences with content and these experiences are even more engaging when visitors are able to share them with each other. A larger set and a more intricate technical network would allow for multiple visitors to explore the exhibit at the same time. Beyond this project, the merging of education and pervasive technology opens a broad new field of immersive experiences that will change the way we learn about and understand our world, past, present, and future.
Acknowledgments:
Mark Bolas, Taylor Curtis, Scott Fisher, Max Geiger, Henry Goldberg, Marientina Gotsis, Perry Hoberman, Mary Ann Kelling, Ken Leung, Michael Naimark, Cynthia Nichols, Ginger Phelps, Leslie & Nathaniel Rosenblatt, Andrew Sacher, Jen Stein, Peggy Weil, Interactive Media Division MFA Class of '07
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