An empirical study on user experience evaluation of VR interface in digital museums

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly introduced to digital museums to enable more immersive experiences. However, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation for user experience in VR-based digital museums. A comprehensive framework for evaluating user experience of VR interfaces in digital museums was created. Based on this framework, the study conducted an experiment to investigate learning effectiveness in VR-based digital museums and compared user experience on desktop and mobile devices. A total of 45 participants were recruited. They were asked to visit a digital museum on either a desktop or a mobile device. After they completed their visit, they took a recognition test and a recall test to measure their effectiveness of learning. Their user experience was evaluated using a new scale, followed by an open-ended interview to collect their opinions and feedback. It was found that introducing VR to the digital museum helped increase users’ effectiveness of learning. Significant differences existed between the desktop and mobile VR interfaces in user experience. It means that previous research findings cannot be directly applied to the user experience of digital museums on mobile. These empirical evidences also suggest that the established framework is effective for evaluating the user experience in VR-based digital museums.