A Methodology to Produce Augmented-Reality Guided Tours in Museums for Mixed-Reality Headsets

Abstract

In recent years, the use of technology in the museum context has changed radically. It has switched from the display of information to offering emotive, immersive, and rich experiences with heritage. Virtual interactive media have the potential to put museums back into a relevant place in our increasingly digital society. The emergence of augmented-reality glasses offers the possibility to test and implement new methodologies compatible with this aim. However, most of the first examples developed in recent years did not take advantage of the possibilities of this new medium. This paper presents a novel methodology for producing mixed-reality applications for museums and heritage sites, with an intuitive, immersive, and natural way of operating. An experimental prototype designed for the archaeological museum of the Almoina is shown in the paper to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed system and methodology of production. In addition, the paper shows the results of several tests.

A Literature Review of User Studies in Extended Reality Applications for Archaeology

“…AR headsets (Microsoft HoloLens to be specific) have been used to enhance museum exhibitions, e.g., MuseumEye in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo [32,33], and in the Museo archeologico de la Almoina [52]. Many existing AR interfaces using headsets have been developed to provide archaeologists with measurement and annotation tools [3,31].…”

“…In some cases, a specific questionnaire is designed appositely (e.g., cultural presence questionnaire [65] for the evaluation of the system, or vice versa, a system designed to test an evaluation method [73]). But an already purposefully constructed questionnaire is customarily preferred when evaluating usability such as SUS [3,9,10,42,52] or NASA TLX (Task Load Index) [75,76].…”

“…In few cases (e.g., [28,41,62,69]), the participants are also directly interviewed in a subjective manner to collect their impression at the moment of the user study without the rigidity of a pre-structured survey in order to "capture ground-truth data" [62]. While using the system, think-aloud feedback [3,5,38,52,53,67,73,75] or direct observation [38,62] are often used to acquire qualitative data. This type of feedback appears to be the preferred technique in user studies when there are usability experts evaluating a system or if a system is designed for an expert in the field.…”

The augmented reality usage for learning of disappearing historical monuments

“…Martí-Testón et al ( 2021) described the development of a mixed reality application for an archaeological museum that allows visitors to experience new information about the history of antiquity in an interactive and entertaining way (Martí-Testón et al, 2021). Seo et al (2010) discuss the prospects for the development of personalized guides with animated virtual assistants based on the recognition of the current location of the tourist and graphic primitives on cultural heritage monuments for overlaying 3D-objects.…”

INFRA REDable. Thermography for the diagnosis and conservation of frescoed walls: the case of the Templar Church of San Bevignate

“…Moreover, the museum digital contents will be extended to the archeological site and its historical/constructive stratifications. Finally, all the museum tour will be further supported by the creation of digital avatars (examples in fig.9) to facilitate the interactions between art goods and visitors(Martí Testón 2021, Belardi 2021b, Bechini 2022).…”