Interactive Remote Museum Visits for Older Adults: An Evaluation of Feelings of Presence, Social Closeness, Engagement, and Enjoyment in an Social Visit

Abstract

This paper explores whether older adults can remotely participate in museum visits with the help of virtual environments. We design and build a system that supports shared museum co-visits between onsite visitors inside the museum and older adults from a care home. We make the experience more engaging by providing a meaningful story, connecting the objects in the museum. The aim of the study is to understand whether older adults are able to use such technology and to study the mediated sense of spatial presence, the experienced social closeness, and the level of participants' engagement and enjoyment in the visit. We discuss the relationship between these aspects and factors leading to a better remote experience for older adults. The results show that older adults enjoy and engage in remote visits, and that there is a positive correlation between enjoyment, engagement and social closeness.

Accessible Cultural Heritage through Explainable Artificial Intelligence

“…The drama was adapting to the visitors so that different available independent drama segments were played to be group based on characteristics of the group of visitors, the specific context of the visit, and implicit input from the visitors themselves. Results showed that drama, when designed for small groups, and combined with the raw emotion of onsite visitors being in front of actual original artifacts, can emotionally engage distant visitors with mobility constrains [15].…”

Mediating distance: new interfaces and interaction design techniques to follow and take part in remote museum visits

“…To our knowledge, there has been no prior research that specifically tests the use of the drama-based approach for older adults in a remote museum visitation. Previous work focused on other types of approaches for remote museum visitations for older adults (Kostoska et al , 2015; Beer and Takayama, 2011; Kostoska et al , 2016; Pisoni et al , 2019; Díaz-Rodríguez and Pisoni, 2020), and our work advances the state of art by providing an empirical investigation of the appropriateness of the drama-based approach for remote museum visits for older adults. Our work addresses the need of this population to stay in contact with both people and places.…”

Online Synchronous Model of Interpretive Sustainable Guiding in Heritage Sites: The Avatar Tourist Visit

“…Consequently, an online focus group was created, that was composed of a wide variety of experts and researchers (20) in the fields of Strategic Communication, Heritage Interpretation, and Sustainable Tourism. Based on a quali-tative discussion with this focus group after each test, the procedure was evaluated on five criteria: applicability, usefulness, immersion (sense of presence: perception of "being physically there"), engagement (involvement), and enjoyment [18][19][20][21]. These participative debate sessions were intended to provide suggestions for analysis and progressive improvements of the model procedure.…”

“…evaluated on five criteria: applicability, usefulness, immersion (sense of presence: perception of "being physically there"), engagement (involvement), and enjoyment [18][19][20][21]. These participative debate sessions were intended to provide suggestions for analysis and progressive improvements of the model procedure.…”