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Storytelling has the potential to revolutionize the way we engage with cultural heritage and has been widely recognized as an important direction for attracting and satisfying the audience of museums and other cultural heritage sites. This approach has been investigated in various research projects, but its adoption outside research remains limited due to the challenges inherent in its creation. In this work, we present the web-based Narralive Storyboard Editor and the Narralive Mobile Player app, developed with the objective to assist the creative process and promote research on different aspects of the application of mobile digital storytelling in cultural heritage settings. The tools have been applied and evaluated in a variety of contexts and sites, and the main findings of this process are presented and discussed, concluding in general findings about the authoring of digital storytelling experiences in cultural heritage.

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Aiming at bridging the gap between the recent advancements in eXtended Reality (XR) research and real-world scenarios, in this paper we describe the first steps of an iterative user-centered methodology developed to elicit user requirements and to design the scenarios for a multi-sensory collaborative XR platform, in the framework of the BRIDGES project. The platform aims to be customizable and flexible, and is intended for use in different pedagogical contexts, instantiated by two pilot scenarios: a) XR training for first-responders and fire brigade staff at international airports and b) XR informal learning experiences addressed to visitors of museums and cultural centers. Through a series of workshops and focus groups with users from relevant organizations, we collected a total of nearly 100 pedagogical, technological, experiential, operational and other user needs from within these two different contexts, and discuss here the challenges and limitations but also the opportunities that were encountered. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; HCI design and evaluation methods.

Recent studies in Virtual Reality highlighted the importance of avoiding Breaks inPresence that occur when experiment participants alternate between the virtualand physical environment to fill in questionnaires or interact with the evaluator.In this paper, we report on a within-groups experiment comparing threemeans of communication between the evaluator and the immersed participantsin user studies in VR: Voice-Speaker, Video-Screen, and a 3D-Avatar. Immersedparticipants (N=38) completed three sets of tasks and were observed and theninterviewed through these three methods successively. Our findings reveal nosignificant difference in user performance between the methods. There were, however,significant differences in how they were perceived by the participants, withVideo-Screen, considered the most effective communication method. In contrast,the 3D-Avatar was the most “fun” and the users’ “favorite”, along with the Video-Screen. The Voice-Speaker was thought to be the least distracting yet impersonal,and least favorite.

Virtual grasping is one of the most common and important interactions performed in a Virtual Environment (VE). Even though there has been substantial research using hand tracking methods exploring different ways of visualizing grasping, there are only a few studies that focus on handheld controllers. This gap in research is particularly crucial, since controllers remain the most used input modality in commercial Virtual Reality (VR). Extending existing research, we designed an experiment comparing three different grasping visualizations when users are interacting with virtual objects in immersive VR using controllers. We examine the following visualizations: the Auto-Pose (AP), where the hand is automatically adjusted to the object upon grasping; the Simple-Pose (SP), where the hand closes fully when selecting the object; and the Disappearing-Hand (DH), where the hand becomes invisible after selecting an object, and turns visible again after positioning it on the target. We recruited 38 participants in order to measure if and how their performance, sense of embodiment, and preference are affected. Our results show that while in terms of performance there is almost no significant difference in any of the visualizations, the perceived sense of embodiment is stronger with the AP, and is generally preferred by the users. Thus, this study incentivizes the inclusion of similar visualizations in relevant future research and VR experiences.

In this work we explore the effect of personality traits on user interaction in virtual reality (VR), on the less widely studied aspect of task performance during object manipulation. We conducted an experiment measuring the performance of 39 users interacting with a virtual environment using the virtual hand metaphor to execute a simple selection and positioning task, with or without virtual obstacles. Our findings suggest concrete correlations between user personality traits and behavior data. Perspective-taking, in particular, seems to be strongly affecting task performance, highlighting the need for further research. Besides the wider implications of our results in relation to the effect of personality on how users experience VR, our main contribution lies in identifying specific traits that should be taken into account when designing experiments involving users performing such tasks. The study of these traits may also significantly advance our understanding of personality traits as part of the user model in a wider range of VR applications, including those offering personalization and recommendation functionality.