Notify-and-interact: A beacon-smartphone interaction for user engagement in galleries

<p dir="ltr">Existing interactive systems suffer from low user engagement due to their passiveness and steep learning curve. To address these issues, this paper presents an interactive framework, Notify-and-Interact, which leverages the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon infrastructure to notify and a smart-phone to interact, such that it transforms a passive interactive system into an active one. The proposed framework is demonstrated in the Ping Yuan and Kinmay W Tang Gallery, where a series of wildlife artworks are exhibited. Engagement conversion rate is measured, and users' quality of experience (QoE) is surveyed through likert assessment. Artworks with Notify-and-Interact outperforms the QR code with a high engagement conversion rate at the interaction stage, i.e., 86% over 53%, and an average engagement time of 55.67s over 28.69s, respectively. The mean opinion score (MOS) shows that around 80% of the users expressed high satisfaction with the installed Notify-and-Interact framework in the gallery.</p>