Using AR and VR characters for enhancing user experience in a museum

Museums and cultural heritage institutions have used technology to create interactive exhibits and pedagogical tools that help spark visitors’ interests. The rise of Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality Systems has further enabled the creation of a new generation of immersive experiences that can engage and educate visitors. These technologies can be used to develop digital characters that can serve as virtual tour guides and improve user engagement by answering questions and forming social bonds with the users. While such tour guides have been deployed as exhibits at many museums, the implementation is usually limited to a single exhibit or a section of the museum space. We believe that visitors will be better served if the virtual guide not only enriches the onsite experience but also provides a take-home experience for users to encourage future visits. This thesis explores the enhancement in user experience that such a system can bring by offering onsite and offsite AR and WebVR technologies to create a virtual tour guide that assists visitors at the Genesee Country Village & Museum through interactive dialog as they explore the historic village on the museum campus

Innovation, technology and user experience in museums: insights from scientific literature

Museums play an important role in preserving the heritage and cultural legacy of humanity, however, one of their main weaknesses in regards the user is their static nature. At present, and in the face of the development of diverse technologies and the ease of access to information, museums have upgraded their implementation of technologies aimed at improving the user experience, trying more and more to access younger audiences with a sensitivity and natural capacity for the management of new technologies. This work identifies trends in the use of technological tools by museums worldwide and the effect of these on the user or visitor experience through a review of scientific literature. To complete the work, we performed a search of the publications in the Scopus® referencing database, and downloaded, processed, and visualized the data using the VOSviewer® tool. The main trends identified in this context of analysis are related to the role of museums with the development and improvement of the user experience; orientation to young audiences and innovation driven by the user through Interactive Systems, digital games, QR Codes, apps, augmented reality, virtual reality and gamification, among others. The objective of the implementation of new technologies in the context of museums is to satisfy the needs of contemporary communication, for all types of content and aimed at an increasingly digital audience, in order to ensure positive interaction and feedback from ideas with social and cultural changes

Tourism Marketing in a Metaverse Context: the New Reality of European Museums on Meta

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Museum Management and Curatorship on 10 May 2023, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2023.2209841[Abstract] The “contactless” culture established after COVID-19 and the development of metaverse technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain and artificial intelligence, serve as vectors of change in museum tourism. Contactless behaviours have forced European museums to reconfigure and strengthen their digital communication and marketing strategies, mainly through social media and audiovisual content, to connect with their audience by virtual means only. This experience has laid the foundations for hybrid communication (physical and virtual) by museums and acted as a pilot experience for their activities in the metaverse of the future. The aim of this research is to analyse the online tourism communication strategies implemented by 20 European museums through Facebook (Meta) in times of COVID-19. The results show the effect of lockdown on patterns of consumption and interaction, and the impact of message content and format on user engagement and participation.This article was supported by the iMARKA research group from University of A Coruña. This article is part of the R&D project Digital-native media in Spain: Strategies, competencies, social involvement and (re)definition of practices in journalistic production and diffusion (PID2021-122534OB-C21), funded by MCIN / AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and by ‘ERDF A way of making Europe

User experience analysis while visiting selected virtual museums

The paper concerns the study of User Experience by focusing on the usability and user satisfaction aspects. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the usability of two selected virtual museums conducted with 3 research methods: using an oculograph, a System Usability Scale (SUS) usability survey and Nielsen heuristic. The examination was conducted on the following museums that offer virtual tours: Muzeum Instrumentów Muzycznych in Poznan and Muzeum Zamojskie in Zamosc. The participants of the eye tracking experiment and the SUS survey were 22 students of Computer Science at the Politechnika Lubelska, while the Nielsen heuristics analysis was performed by 3 graduate students with relevant qualifications. The obtained eye tracking data, the results of the SUS questionnaires and the evaluation of the Nielsen heuristics were analyzed quantitatively. In addition, a qualitative analysis of eye tracking results was conducted, which provided heat maps and scanning paths. As a result, it was revealed that in the oculography method, the analyzed websites obtained comparable results. However, in the test performed with the SUS usability survey Muzeum Instrumentów Muzycznych achieved a better result. The expert team reviewing Nielsen heuristics also ranked the museum higher

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of the National Museums

This paper is concerned with online museum education, exploring the themes of user-centredness, digitization, authority and control. Taking as its starting point the shift of focus in museum policy from the collection to the user-learner, it suggests that this movement from object to subject – this ‘de-centring’ of the cultural institution – is further complicated by a fundamental change in the nature of the object, as a result of digitization programmes which transform material, ‘possessible’ artefacts into volatile amalgams of bits and bytes. The ability of users to take, manipulate, re-distribute and re-describe digital objects is, we suggest, a primary source of their educational value. It is also, however, a source of difficulty for institutions as they come to terms with the changing patterns of ownership, participation and knowledge production we are experiencing as we move further into the digital age

The Image as a Communication Tool for Virtual Museums. Narration and the Enjoyment of Cultural Heritage

The challenge of contemporary museums is to make content accessible to a wider audience; in this way information related to the good becomes more communicative and usable in order to enhance its uniqueness. Accessibility goes through an innovative communication of content: the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that are increasingly part of people’s daily lives. Communication in most cases occurs visually, so ICTs are increasingly focusing on a rethinking of this expressive form; images become a better support for high-quality data transfer

'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

Promising Beginning? Evaluating Museum Mobile Phone Apps

Since 2009 museums have started introducing mobile apps in their range of interpretative media and visitor services. As mobile technology continues to develop and permeate all aspects of our life, and the capabilities of smart phones increase while they become more accessible and popular, new possibilities arise for cultural institutions to exploit these tools for communicating in new ways and promoting their exhibitions and programmes. The use of mobile apps opens up new channels of communication between the cultural institution and the user, which extent to his or her personal space and go beyond the boundaries of the museum’s walls. The paper presents a survey carried out of mobile apps designed by art or cultural historical museums and analyses the wider issues which are raised by the findings. It discusses, among others, the kind of use these apps were designed to fulfil (e.g. the majority are guided tours to the permanent collections or to temporary exhibitions), the layering of content,and the type of user interaction and involvement they support