Drawing-type Search Method Focusing on Penguin's Abdominal Patterns for Enriching Observation Experiences in an Aquarium

Some aquariums give names to the individual animals in their care in order to encourage visitors to observe them. However, it is not easy for visitors to remember names without their having a detailed memory of the individual animals. We previously proposed a method to enable visitors to aquariums to identify individual penguins by drawing the animals’ distinctive abdominal patterns and analyzed the similarity of the drawings. In this study, we developed a prototype system that enables users to retrieve penguins' names by drawing abdominal patterns on a smartphone and investigated its effectiveness. The experiment's results suggested that observations using this system improved the ability of some of the experiment's participants to remember the penguins.