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Comparison of visitor experiences of virtual reality exhibitions by spatial environment
Abstract
The growing interest in the metaverse has led to a corresponding increase in attention towards virtual reality (VR) exhibitions. Furthermore, with the potential and possibility of a virtual environment without physical and economic constraints, expectations for user experiences based on diverse exhibition environments are increasing. Accordingly, this study investigated the characteristics of visitor experience in relation to the spatial environment of VR exhibitions, particularly focusing on the representational fidelity of the real-physical world. We experimented with comparing the user experience in reality-based (realistically representing the physical world, high representational fidelity level) and virtuality-based (surreal, low representational fidelity level) VR exhibition settings to explore design implementation. User experience data were collected through surveys, behavioral observation by video recording, and interviews. In terms of surveys, there was no significant difference in presence and enjoyment by environment, but the reality-based environment was scored significantly higher for communication. The behavioral analysis found that more active movements were captured in the virtuality-based environment. Qualitative analysis of the interview found differences in perception, emotions, and behavior by spatial environment, such that the newness and openness of the virtuality-based environment induced active movement of participants, and the familiarity of the reality-based environment provided comfortable feelings and supported participants’ concentration on exhibition contents. The results of the study suggest how the spatial environment of VR exhibitions can contribute to user experiences.
... In a museum setting, VR devices allow visitors to travel time and space, immerse themselves in historical cultures or the significance of exhibits, and overcome space limitations museums often face (Chung et al., 2024). This represents a highly effective and innovative approach to exhibition. ...
... Other museums, such as the British Museum, employ VR technology to create the virtual exhibition "Defining Beauty", allowing visitors to explore ancient Greek and Roman artworks through VR headsets (Mamur et al., 2020). With the continuous advancement of VR technology, more museums are poised to adopt VR devices to create immersive and interactive exhibition experiences (Chung et al., 2024;Mirza et al., 2024). Other notable VR exhibitions include the Battle of Neretva, a VR application at the Museum of Jablanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Rizvic et al., 2022) and Getty Museum's 'Together: Join the Crowd in Celebrated European Paintings' project (Getty . ...
This study investigates the behavioural intentions of museum visitors towards Virtual Reality (VR) technology, spanning the years 2010–2023. It evaluates literature quality, explores research theories, and identifies trends. Findings indicate that most museum visitors hold positive attitudes towards VR, necessitating further research on generational perspectives. Quantitative research methods dominate (77.8%), with 38.9% employing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) or its extensions. Key influencing factors include perceived usefulness, information quality, perceived ease of use, and psychological cognition. The study underscores the importance of comprehending generational differences among museum visitors and advocates for adopting comprehensive theoretical models in future research within the museum domain. This research contributes to understanding how museum visitors engage with VR technology, emphasising nuanced approaches considering generational variations and recommending more inclusive theoretical frameworks.
... Karnchanapayap (2023) evaluated the efficiency and satisfaction of VR experiences through audience participation in a virtual amusement park. Furthermore, Chung et al. (2024) compared user experiences in reality-based and virtual-based VR exhibition settings. Finally, Sylaiou et al. (2024) enhanced user experiences based on the visions of artists and curators, Augmented Reality (AR), and visitor demands, and analyzed relevant evaluation criteria. ...
The 3D reconstruction and virtual display of wooden furniture cultural relics were investigated using laser scanning and CT scanning techniques. The suitability of different 3D reconstruction techniques and virtual display approaches were considered. The experiments demonstrated that digital models obtained from both laser scanning and CT scanning can be integrated seamlessly into virtual environments created with 3DMAX for exhibition purposes. Additionally, post-processing software, such as PR or AE, can be utilized to synthesize virtual display video. The resulting images exhibit self-adaptation capabilities, with clear and undistorted 3D model and texture image. Moreover, other types of scanned models are suitable for 3D micro-scale model printing, although CT-based models tend to achieve higher printing accuracy compared to those generated by laser scanning technology. However, the precision of 3D printing model is contingent upon factors such as the precision of digital model, the type of printer, and the printing material.
Background Despite the significant level of recent interest in social virtual reality (VR), there has been little discussion about environment design considerations that affect social interactions. This study suggests two possibilities for environment design in social VR. One is reality-based worlds where the definition of place is obvious, and the other is virtuality-based worlds where the definition of place is ambiguous. This study aims to explore environment roles in social VR by comparing behaviours and users' responses in the two environments, with a focus on the early stages of social VR. Methods This study collected data from 46 research participants who were assigned to a team and arranged in a virtuality-based or reality-based environment setting. In order to explore initial social interactions, data of exploration and meeting sessions were collected. The differences in behaviour, according to their environment, were compared based on the coding scheme via video recording. For qualitative analysis, a contextual interview was held to understand affective responses by the given environment and the environmental factors influencing behaviours. Results As a result of the behaviour observation analysis, specific behaviours were prominent according to the provided environment designs in the early stages of social interactions. Significantly, we found that the behaviour of gazing at other participants (S_HeD) was significantly higher in the virtuality-based environment, and the behaviour of manipulating objects (In_Obj) was prominent in the reality-based space during the exploration session. On the other hand, the gap in behaviour decreased during the meeting session. As a result of the interview analysis, it was revealed that the virtuality-based environment indicates freedom to users, while the reality-based environment provides familiarity. Conclusions This research contributes to exploring the design possibilities and considerations through user data analysis of the different social VR environments. The study illustrates the importance of environment design in social VR and showes that the design can induce specific behaviours according to its contextual meaning. Also, social interactions can be motivated depending on how users affectively accept the environment. Understanding the role of environment design is significant for successful social VR functioning.
Understanding the effects of environmental features such as visual
realism on spatial memory can inform a human-centered design of
virtual environments. This paper investigates the effects of visual
realism on object location memory in virtual reality, taking account
of individual differences, gaze, and locomotion. Participants freely
explored two environments which varied in visual realism, and then
recalled the locations of objects by returning the misplaced objects
back to original locations. Overall, we did not find a significant relationship
between visual realism and object location memory. We
found, however, that individual differences such as spatial ability
and gender accounted for more variance than visual realism. Gaze
and locomotion analysis suggest that participants exhibited longer
gaze duration and more clustered movement patterns in the low
realism condition. Preliminary inspection further found that locomotion
hotspots coincided with objects that showed a significant
gaze time difference between high and low visual realism levels.
These results suggest that high visual realism still provides positive
spatial learning affordances but the effects are more intricate.
There has not been much research on the impact of the museum environment on the formation of visitor loyalty. The purpose of this study is to discover the convoluted relationships among internal and external physical environments, involvement, knowledge value, satisfaction, and desire in forming visitor loyalty. A field survey was carried out at museums. A confirmatory factor analysis with the collected data showed that the measures used included an adequate level of measurement quality. The proposed model was revised by adding four meaningful approaches to improve the anticipatory ability and model fit. Results from the structural analysis demonstrated the criticality of both internal and external dimensions of physical environments in loyalty formation and identified the significant mediating impact of cognitive, evaluative, and motivational factors in our theoretical framework. Moreover, the relative importance of desire in increasing loyalty was found. Research contributions to the museum literature are discussed.
The number of social VR applications-or applications that support social interaction between users in virtual reality-has grown considerably in recent years. A consequence of this growth is that the state of social VR application design has become increasingly obfuscated, which complicates identification of design trends, best practices, and uncommon features that are perhaps worthy of wider adoption. To help address this problem, this paper presents a taxonomy of social VR application design choices as informed by 29 commercial and prototypical applications in the literature. Discussion of the taxonomy highlights novel features of research prototypes that could potentially enrich the social experience in commercially available applications. The paper concludes by considering how the taxonomy can guide future design of social VR applications, and next steps for refining the taxonomy.
In order to take advantage of the potential offered by the medium of virtual reality (VR), it will be essential to develop an understanding of how to maximize the desirable experience of “presence” in a virtual space (“being there”), and how to minimize the undesirable feeling of “cybersickness” (a constellation of discomfort symptoms experienced in VR). Although there have been frequent reports of a possible link between the observer’s sense of presence and the experience of bodily discomfort in VR, the amount of literature that discusses the nature of the relationship is limited. Recent research has underlined the possibility that these variables have shared causes, and that both factors may be manipulated with a single approach. This review paper summarizes the concepts of presence and cybersickness and highlights the strengths and gaps in our understanding about their relationship. We review studies that have measured the association between presence and cybersickness, and conclude that the balance of evidence favors a negative relationship between the two factors which is driven principally by sensory integration processes. We also discuss how system immersiveness might play a role in modulating both presence and cybersickness. However, we identify a serious absence of high-powered studies that aim to reveal the nature of this relationship. Based on this evidence we propose recommendations for future studies investigating presence, cybersickness, and other related factors.
Museums are good places for learning and nowadays many museums are integrating digital media such as video and increasingly moving towards using virtual reality. In the physical world people used to seek information from object surfaces e.g. posters on the wall and this has been used as a metaphor in the virtual reality museum: numerous videos were inhabited within virtual objects and shaped cross-objects user interfaces (COUIs). However, how such interfaces perform for video interactions still needs more investigations. In this study we implemented and investigated COUIs in comparison with the conventional card-style user interfaces and the plain virtual reality user interfaces in the virtual reality museum. The results reported no significant differences in the perceived usability or learning experience between these user interfaces, except the COUIs had a lower level of satisfaction than the card-style user interfaces. However, the COUIs showed greater efficiency with shorter eye fixation durations and higher saccade frequencies, and within these COUIs instances, namely the fully-detached, semi-attached, and fully-attached COUIs, the fully-attached instance was closest to the form of interacting with physical object surfaces and it reported highest efficiency as well. Rationales behind these results and implications generalising for the future design of COUIs, are discussed.
The latest technical and interaction advancements that took place in the Virtual Reality (VR) field have marked a new era, not only for VR, but also for VR locomotion. Although the latest advancements in VR locomotion have raised the interest of both researchers and users in analyzing and experiencing current VR locomotion techniques, the field of research on VR locomotion, in its new era, is still uncharted. In this work, VR locomotion is explored through a systematic literature review investigating empirical studies of VR locomotion techniques from 2014–2017. The review analyzes the VR locomotion techniques that have been studied, their interaction-related characteristics and the research topics that were addressed in these studies. Thirty-six articles were identified as relevant to the literature review, and the analysis of the articles resulted in 73 instances of 11 VR locomotion techniques, such as real-walking, walking-in-place, point and teleport, joystick-based locomotion, and more. Results showed that since the VR revival, the focus of VR locomotion research has been on VR technology and various technological aspects, overshadowing the investigation of user experience. From an interaction perspective, the majority of the utilized and studied VR locomotion techniques were found to be based on physical interaction, exploiting physical motion cues for navigation in VR environments. A significant contribution of the literature review lies in the proposed typology for VR locomotion, introducing four distinct VR locomotion types: motion-based, room scale-based, controller-based and teleportation-based locomotion.
Purpose
This paper aims to propose a value co-creation framework through examining the opportunities of implementing augmented reality, virtual reality and 3D printing in to the visitor experience in the cultural heritage places.
Design/methodology/approach
This study proposes the conceptual model of value co-creation using a case study approach by presenting some cases of a cultural heritage place in UK.
Findings
Findings suggest that the effective use of multiple technologies in the context of cultural heritage places contributes to the co-creation of value for both cultural heritage organisations and also for visitors’ pre-visit, onsite and post-visit experience. Businesses can benefit from increased spending, intention to return and positive word-of-mouth while visitors receive a personalised, educational, memorable and interactive experience.
Practical implications
Cultural heritage places have to find new ways to in order to survive increasingly fierce competition. Using technology and the concept of value co-creation can prove to be a valuable concept in an attempt to attract new target markets, enhance visitors’ experience, create positive word-of-mouth and revisit intentions.
Originality/value
Recently, increased importance has been placed on the co-creation of value to account for consumers interest in playing part in the development of services and products recently. This research takes a holistic approach using augmented reality, virtual reality and 3D printing from value co-creation perspective.
Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper illuminates the experience of a museum space. It sheds light on the interpretive interplay between museological space, content and narrative throughout the construction of meanings by museum visitors. I argue that these spatial dynamics emerge as a condition of meaning-making, or hermeneutic foundation, which facilitates the subsequent processes of meaning-making, or interpretations. The hermeneutic examination of the research material treats Te Papa as a physical space or form with its individual components such as architecture, exhibition design and display. This is followed by an inspection of content which reveals the key function of ‘narrative’ as a human meaning-making tool in mediating the mutual relationship of spatial form, museological content and meaning. The empirical insights into the complexity of the visitor experience reveal that representational and non-representational dimensions, or narrative and embodiment, are inextricably entangled in the quest for meaning.
Museums face the problem of a decreasing number of visitors. One way to solve this problem is to attract new target groups such as young people. Therefore, some museum started to develop online museums where they digitally present their exhibition artefacts to a larger audience. One way to reach this goal are virtual environments. But how can potential visitors be motivated to visit the museum continuously and how can knowledge of the artwork be transferred? Gamification is one approach that could solve both problems. This article develops a guidance based on gamification approaches for a virtual museums guide based on different use cases.
Understanding visitors’ level of engagement with tourist attractions is vital for successful heritage management and marketing. This paper develops a scale to measure visitors’ level of engagement in tourist attractions. It also establishes a relationship between the drivers of engagement and level of engagement using Partial Least Square, whereby both formative and reflective scales are included. The structural model is tested with a sample of 625 visitors at Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, UK. The empirical validation of the conceptual model supports the research hypotheses. Whilst prior knowledge, recreational motivation and omnivore-univore cultural capital positively affect visitors’ level of engagement, there is no significant relationship between reflective motivation and level of engagement. These findings contribute to a better understanding of visitor engagement in tourist attractions. A series of managerial implications are also proposed.
In marketing strategies, the consumer-focus approach reveals customer experience management as a differentiating tool for competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive environment. In recent years, museums compete with other leisure and educational institutions such as other museums, theatres, cinemas and amusement parks. Thus, customer experience management provides a competitive advantage for museums. This study aims to reveal the effects of customer experiences from the museum perspective. For this purpose, an exploratory research and a descriptive research are conducted in Istanbul. Based on the research findings, a structural equation model is developed to reveal the relationships between customer experiences and post experience dimensions (learning in museum, visitor satisfaction, visit intensification, word-of-mouth communication and revisit intention).
Cultural feelings are an undertheorised area of the human experience which are recently gaining attention and which need to be understood in the context of museum visitor studies where they are largely ignored. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper unearths the conditions of meaning-making or hermeneutic foundations that facilitate the subsequent processes of meaning-making or interpretations. It argues that the engagement with a museum space starts on a sensory, emotive and embodied level. Visitors’ narrations of their visit to the museum reveal that emotions and feelings are not separate stages of the museum experience but are continuously interwoven with intellectual and interpretive processes. Importantly, the empirical evidence shows that certain meanings remain on an embodied level as an ‘internal understanding’ and resist any verbal ‘expressibility’. The conditions flow into the processes of meaning-making during cross-cultural encounters within the material museum world. Here, feelings enter into the realm of culture and thus into the experience of heritage.
This study is a multi-method, intrinsic case study evaluation of social interaction understood as a global dimension of Quality of Life (QOL) in a special care unit (SCU) for cognitively impaired older persons. The study proposes an initial means for describing and evaluating the social affordance of a place. Through the accumulation of similar case studies, care practice can make better informed decisions because of an awareness of successful or unsuccessful patterns that begin to emerge in the descriptive data. Reflecting the improvement-orientation of the evaluation, the SCU in question is found to have several factors-organizational and physical in nature which unwittingly thwart the therapeutic benefit of social interaction. The case study adopts an environment behavior perspective following the theoretical development. The focus of the evaluation is the consensual and social-normative aspects of social interaction.
Subsumed under the umbrella of User Experience (UX), practitioners and academics of Human–Computer Interaction look for ways to broaden their understanding of what constitutes
“pleasurable experiences” with technology. The present study considered the fulfilment of universal psychological needs, such
as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, or autonomy, to be the major source of positive experience
with interactive technologies. To explore this, we collected over 500 positive experiences with interactive products (e.g.,
mobile phones, computers). As expected, we found a clear relationship between need fulfilment and positive affect, with stimulation,
relatedness, competence and popularity being especially salient needs. Experiences could be further categorized by the primary
need they fulfil, with apparent qualitative differences among some of the categories in terms of the emotions involved. Need
fulfilment was clearly linked to hedonic quality perceptions, but not as strongly to pragmatic quality (i.e., perceived usability),
which supports the notion of hedonic quality as “motivator” and pragmatic quality as “hygiene factor.” Whether hedonic quality
ratings reflected need fulfilment depended on the belief that the product was responsible for the experience (i.e., attribution).
Falk and Dierking's Contextual Model of Learning was used as a theoretical construct for investigating learning within a free-choice setting. A review of previous research identified key variables fundamental to free-choice science learning. The study sought to answer two questions: (1) How do specific independent variables individually contribute to learning outcomes when not studied in isolation? and (2) Does the Contextual Model of Learning provide a useful framework for understanding learning from museums? A repeated measure design including interviews and observational and behavioral measures was used with a random sample of 217 adult visitors to a life science exhibition at a major science center. The data supported the contention that variables such as prior knowledge, interest, motivation, choice and control, within and between group social interaction, orientation, advance organizers, architecture, and exhibition design affect visitor learning. All of these factors were shown to individually influence learning outcomes, but no single factor was capable of adequately explaining visitor learning outcomes across all visitors. The framework provided by the Contextual Model of Learning proved useful for understanding how complex combinations of factors influenced visitor learning. These effects were clearerest when visitors were segmented by entry conditions such as prior knowledge and interest. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed89:744–778, 2005
User experience (UX) analysis is essential for designers and companies when optimising products or services as it can help designers to uncover valuable information, such as the hedonic and pragmatic qualities of a UX. While previous research has described the conventional methods of UX analysis, such as surveys or subjective determination, this paper proposes a data-driven methodology to automatically integrate hedonic and pragmatic qualities for UX from online customer reviews. The proposed methodology comprises the following steps. First, we combined a corpus-based approach, a dictionary-based approach and word embedding to generate a lexicon of hedonic and pragmatic qualities. Second, we filtered out the sentences that contained no hedonic or pragmatic information and classified the remaining review sentences. Third, we extracted and clustered the UX elements (such as product features, context information, and context clustering). Finally, we scored each UX element based on hedonic or pragmatic qualities and compared it against previous UX modelling. This study integrates hedonic and pragmatic qualities to enrich UX modelling in the field of UX. For a product designer, the UX analysis results may highlight a requirement to optimise product design. It may also represent a potential market opportunity in a UX state where most of the current products are perceived UX results by customers. This research also examines the invaluable relationship between UX and online customer reviews to support the prospective planning of customer strategy and design activities.
This paper proposes a dynamic VR environment design approach to enhance the way a user experiences a computer generated character’s movement. We transferred concepts and practices from performance studies to create a dynamic VR environment, in which design elements are interconnected and changing with the character’s movement. Our focus was on space and light as two essential elements of both dance performances and virtual environments. We employed and tested our dynamic VR environment design approach by means of two studies (on space and on light) with 24 users in total. The results of these studies are discussed with regard to the enhancement of, and benefits for the user experience, followed by suggestions for the applicability of our approach to other fields in VR design.
Numerous studies have shown a beneficial effect of exposing people to natural landscapes and plants on their well-being and attentional functioning. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a natural virtual environment on creativity in a task consisting of sketching ideas of creative solutions to a problem. The participants in this experiment were asked to sketch ideas of innovative workstation for a person in a wheelchair. To do this, they used a virtual reality sketching tool. They performed this task once in a neutral environment (all in the dark), one in a natural virtual environment (forest) and once in a non-natural environment (office). The results revealed that people tend to be more creative in this task when they are immersed in a natural environment than when they are in a neutral environment without any vegetation.
As online virtual exhibitions become a central communication channel in museums, and both the communication and entertainment aspects of museums are being emphasized, various presentation methods are being adopted to attract visitors to such exhibitions. Therefore, this study examines the effect of virtual exhibition presentation methods on visitor communication and enjoyment, focusing on a comparison of 2D and 3D presentation. The findings indicate that 2D presentation is more effective for intuitive communication than 3D, and visitor enjoyment was aroused at different points according to the presentation methods. The 2D visitors showed their interest in information acquisition while focusing on exhibition content, whereas 3D visitors enjoyed exploring the virtual environment. Additional implications of this study for both further research and practice are discussed.
This collaborative research between a team of digital technology developers and academic researchers investigates how social interaction affects visitors' experience during a virtual reality (VR) underwater seascape exploration. Prior research in immersive VR focused more on individual perceptions of immersion, interactive features and enjoyment. Analysis of focus-group discussions revealed three categories of immersion, interaction with the virtual environment (VE) and social interaction salient to satisfaction with the experience. Moderated mediation analysis of survey results from a full-scale trial (N = 234) show that the three variables had a significant role in experience satisfaction and loyalty intentions. Specifically, immersion mediates person-VE interaction effects on satisfaction and loyalty. The results contrast with previous findings from online gaming contexts, showing that social interactions decrease the impact of immersion on satisfaction and loyalty. We call for caution in the positioning and communication of VR experiences and for further research in other settings.
The aim of this study is to establish the relationships between (i) motivational drivers (serious leisure, meaningfulness, prior knowledge) and levels of engagement; (ii) and between levels of engagement and outcomes (word-of-mouth and passionate desire to return). The proposed model is tested with a sample of 461 visitors’ experiences at Museum of Coaches in Lisbon, Portugal. Serious leisure and prior knowledge are important motivators of engagement with museums. Engaged visitors are more willing to return and spread the word to others. The findings contribute to better understand the visitors’ perceptions of museums as tourist attractions. Several implications can be pointed out from the study and interesting directions for future research.
As the Internet and information and communications technology have deeply penetrated our daily lives and entered mainstream culture in our societies, the domain and roles of virtual exhibitions have expanded, making them the centre of museum activities. Such exhibitions are used as a communication medium in various areas, particularly for communication with diverse visitors. Therefore, this study was conducted to understand factors affecting visitor communication and their influences on virtual exhibitions, an interdisciplinary and integrated design field, from a macroscopic perspective through literature review. Factors affecting communication were broadly divided into personal, social, content, and environmental factors, which are individually reviewed in detail. This article develops design guidelines for systematic and theoretically grounded research on virtual exhibitions. The guidelines can also help ensure effective communication between visitors and virtual exhibitions.
Virtual reality (VR) can provide our minds with direct access to digital media in a way that seemingly has no limits. However, creating compelling VR experiences is an incredibly complex challenge. When VR is done well, the results are brilliant and pleasurable experiences that go beyond what we can do in the real world. When VR is done badly, not only is the system frustrating to use, but it can result in sickness. There are many causes of bad VR; some failures come from the limitations of technology, but many come from a lack of understanding perception, interaction, design principles, and real users. This book discusses these issues by emphasizing the human element of VR. The fact is, if we do not get the human element correct, then no amount of technology will make VR anything more than an interesting tool confined to research laboratories. Even when VR principles are fully understood, the first implementation is rarely novel and almost never ideal due to the complex nature of VR and the countless possibilities that can be created. The VR principles discussed in this book will enable readers to intelligently experiment with the rules and iteratively design towards innovative experiences.
Gamification has become a focus of attention in an increasing number of fields including business, education, and health care. Through a wide range of applications and support functions, its potential for the tourism industry is significant. Gamification of tourism can contribute to a more rewarding interactions and higher level of satisfaction, as well as increase brand awareness and loyalty to the destination. As one of the first attempts to conceptualize gamification of tourism, this paper examines gaming in general terms and the application of it in specific tourism fields. It identifies game design elements that can contribute to a meaningful gamification. A few cases of best practices are presented to show how this innovative concept can benefit tourism marketing. Implications for tourism marketing and management are discussed as well as future research recommendations.
In this paper we present virtual museum as an extension to the real museum, and outline different possibilities of using technology based display of virtual content to create a unique and individual visitor experience. We look into innovation of virtual museum from the perspective of added value to the displayed content, and innovative interaction with the content. Based on examples three areas of creating a playful visitor experience are explored more in detail: apps and games for using at home or in classroom specifically addressing younger visitors, virtual tours allowing for non-physical field trips, and museum quests that are combining virtual and real world. In conclusions, further deployment possibilities of combining virtual and real for interactive and conversational visitor experience are also discussed.
As the role and domain of exhibitions have expanded, the exhibition has been used as a communication medium in increasingly diverse areas. In particular, the rapid increase in information-based exhibitions has been followed by an expansion of the role of exhibition text as well as the emergence of various typographical presentation methods for more effective communication. Therefore, this research was conducted to study the attention and communication characteristics of exhibition visitors, focusing on the presentation method of using an entire architectural surface, such as the floor, wall, or ceiling of an exhibition hall, as the presentation interface. In addition, in-depth interviews were used after comparative experiments with the panel display, the most popular conventional method used in exhibitions. The test results showed a significant positive correlation between visitor attention and communication. Compared with the panel display, the typographical presentation method utilizing the architectural surface as interface (ASI) was found to increase visitor attention by stimulating more of the visitor’s interest and by transforming each exhibition element into a visual reference through variations in the position and scale of typography. Most of all, when compared with the panel display, the ASI display was found to be more effective in communicating with casual visitors who are skimming through the exhibition.
Purpose
Recent advancements in wearable computing offer opportunities for art galleries to provide a unique experience. However, to ensure successful implementation of this new technology in the visitor industry, it is essential to understand user requirements from a visitor’s point of view. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate visitors’ requirements for the development of a wearable smart glasses augmented reality (AR) application in the museum and art gallery context.
Design/methodology/approach
Interviews with 28 art gallery visitors were conducted and an affinity diagram technique was used to analyze the interviews.
Findings
The findings reveal that wearable AR is in its infancy and that technical and design issues have to be overcome for a full adoption. It reveals that content requirement, functional requirement, comfort, experience and resistance are important when developing and implementing the wearable AR application in the museum and art gallery contexts.
Originality/value
Mapping user requirements in the wearable smart glasses AR context using an affinity diagram is a new approach and therefore contributes to the creation of knowledge in the tourism domain. Practically, the area of wearable technologies and AR within the tourism and visitor industry context is still relatively unexplored, and the present paper provides a first foundation for the implementation of wearable smart glasses AR applications in the museum and art gallery context.
The relation between energy consumption and its environmental impact is weak or even almost inexistent in the Brazilian scenario due to sociocultural reasons. This work takes advantage of an experimental smart grid deployment scenario to propose the concept of Social Eco-feedback Technology. It aims at establishing this relation by promoting a new social affordance (behavior pattern), favoring a new way of perceiving energy. The concept of affordance and artifacts of the Organizational Semiotics are extended to encompass both the analysis of actual and intended behavior through a new technology design. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.
Museums are increasingly being equipped with interactive technology. The main goal of using technology is to improve the museum-going experience of visitors. In this paper, we present the results of a study with an electronic quest through a museum aimed at children in the age of 10-12. We wanted to find out whether personalization of the quest effects enjoyment. For this purpose we involved an interactive multi-touch table in the experiment, which also offered the opportunity to add the element of collaboration. We compared a group that did the original non-personalized quest with a group that did the personalized quest. This last group interacted with the multi-touch table to personalize the quest before they started on it. No significant differences were found between the experimental groups. We did find many differences between the children of age 10-11 and those of age 11-12, on almost all measurements. On this aspect we present some methodical results about measuring enjoyment and intrinsic motivation with children of 10-12 years old.
This paper describes the museum wearable: a wearabl e computer which orchestrates an audiovisual narration as a function of the visitor's interests gathered from his/her physical path in the museum and length of stops. The wearable is made by a lightweight and small computer that people carry inside a shoulder pack. It offers an audiovisual augmentation of the surrounding environment using a small, lightweight eye-piece display (often called private-eye) attached to conventional headphones. Using custom built infrared location sensors distributed in the museum space, and statistical mathematical modeling, the museum wearable builds a progressively refined user model and uses it to deliver a personalized audiovisual narration to the visitor. This device will enrich and personalize the museum visit as a visual and auditory storyteller that is able to adapt its story to the audience's interests and guide the public through the path of the exhibit.
We investigate the nature and extent of enjoyment experienced by users of the Web by developing an instrument for the measurement of this new construct. We establish the reliability and validity of the instrument through a range of psychometric tests. We show that the instrument may have both managerial and theory-building applications in predicting and explaining Web users'attitudes, experiences, and behaviors.
Simulator sickness (SS) in high-fidelity visual simulators is a byproduct of modem simulation technology. Although it involves symptoms similar to those of motion-induced sickness (MS), SS tends to be less severe, to be of lower incidence, and to originate from elements of visual display and visuo-vestibular interaction atypical of conditions that induce MS. Most studies of SS to date index severity with some variant of the Pensacola Motion Sickness Questionnaire (MSQ). The MSQ has several deficiencies as an instrument for measuring SS. Some symptoms included in the scoring of MS are irrelevant for SS, and several are misleading. Also, the configural approach of the MSQ is not readily adaptable to computer administration and scoring. This article describes the development of a Simulator Sickness Questiomaire (SSQ), derived from the MSQ using a series of factor analyses, and illustrates its use in monitoring simulator performance with data from a computerized SSQ survey of 3,691 simulator hops. The database used for development included more than 1,100 MSQs, representing data from 10 Navy simulators. The SSQ provides straightforward computer or manual scoring, increased power to identify "problem" simulators, and improved diagnostic capability.
The recent development of personal digital collections systems on museum websites has prompted researchers to examine the motivations and expectations of museum visitors as they interact with those systems. Results from an online survey completed by visitors to six different museum websites show that users of personal digital collections systems are primarily motivated by a desire to create simple collections of objects and images, and are less influenced by the more complicated features museums have implemented to encourage user participation. The significance of these findings is explored through a discussion of user expectations and motivations when creating personal digital collections, and an attempt is made to reconcile some of the disparities between the perceptions of survey respondents and the experiences of museum professionals developing and implementing personal digital collections systems.
This paper describes a comparative study of three usability test approaches: concurrent think-aloud protocols, retrospective think-aloud protocols, and constructive interaction. These three methods were compared by means of an evaluation of an online library catalogue, which involved four points of comparison: number and type of usability problems detected; relevance of the problems detected; overall task performance; and participant experiences. The results of the study showed that there were only few significant differences between the usability test approaches, mainly with respect to manner of problem detecting, task performance and participant experience. For the most part, the usability methods proved very much comparable, revealing similar numbers and types of problems that were equally relevant. Taking some practical aspects into account, a case can be made for preferring the concurrent think-aloud protocols over the other two methods. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
This article suggests an integrated view of media entertainment that is capable of covering more of the dimensional complexity and dynamics of entertainment experiences than existing theories do. Based on a description of what is meant by complexity and dynamics, the authors outline a conceptual model that is centered around enjoyment as the core of entertainment, and that addresses prerequisites of enjoyment which have to be met by the individual media user and by the given media product. The theoretical foundation is used to explain why people display strong preferences for being entertained (motivational perspective) and what kind of consequences entertaining media consumption may have (effects perspective, e.g., facilitation of learning processes).
Contemporary museums are much more than places devoted to the placement and the exhibition of collections and artworks; indeed, they are nowadays considered as a privileged means for communication and play a central role in making culture accessible to the mass audience. One of the keys to approach the general public is the use of new technologies and novel interaction paradigms. These means, which bring with them an undeniable appeal, allow curators to modulate the cultural proposal by structuring different courses for different user profiles. Immersive Virtual reality (VR) is probably one of the most appealing and potentially effective technologies to serve this purpose; nevertheless, it is still quite uncommon to find immersive installations in museums. Starting from our 10 years' experience in this topic, and following an in-depth survey about these technologies and their use in cultural contexts, we propose a classification of VR installations, specifically oriented to cultural heritage applications, based on their features in terms of interaction and immersion. On the basis of this classification, aiming to provide a tool for framing VR systems which would hopefully suggest indications related to costs, usability and quality of the sensorial experience, we analyze a series of live examples of which we point out strengths and weak points. We then summarize the current state and the very next future, identifying the major issues that prevent these technologies from being actually widespread, and outline proposals for a more pervasive and effective use of Immersive VR for cultural purposes.
Although player enjoyment is central to computer games, there is currently no accepted model of player enjoyment in games. There are many heuristics in the literature, based on elements such as the game interface, mechanics, gameplay, and narrative. However, there is a need to integrate these heuristics into a validated model that can be used to design, evaluate, and understand enjoyment in games. We have drawn together the various heuristics into a concise model of enjoyment in games that is structured by flow. Flow, a widely accepted model of enjoyment, includes eight elements that, we found, encompass the various heuristics from the literature. Our new model, GameFlow, consists of eight elements -- concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social interaction. Each element includes a set of criteria for achieving enjoyment in games. An initial investigation and validation of the GameFlow model was carried out by conducting expert reviews of two real-time strategy games, one high-rating and one low-rating, using the GameFlow criteria. The result was a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real-time strategy games and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the GameFlow model as an evaluation tool. The GameFlow criteria were able to successfully distinguish between the high-rated and low-rated games and identify why one succeeded and the other failed. We concluded that the GameFlow model can be used in its current form to review games; further work will provide tools for designing and evaluating enjoyment in games.
This article reports on the development of an instrument designed to measure the enjoyment of computer game play. Despite the enormous technological progress in the field of computer games, enjoyment of computer game play is still not a well-defined construct. Based on Nabi and Krcmar's (200430.
Nabi , R. L. and
Krcmar , M. 2004. Conceptualizing media enjoyment as attitude: Implications for mass media effects research. Communication Theory, 14: 288–310. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) tripartite model of media enjoyment, a survey questionnaire was developed to measure computer game players' affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions. Expert consultation, exploratory, and confirmatory card sorting sessions were used to refine the instrument. A survey of computer game players was subsequently conducted to test the instrument. Reliabilities and construct validities were analyzed. Findings and their implications were discussed.