Abstract
Culture is a field that is currently entering a revolutionary phase, no longer being a privilege for the few, but expanding to new audiences who are urged to not only passively consume cultural heritage content, but actually participate and assimilate it on their own. In this context, museums have already embraced new technologies as part of their exhibitions, many of them featuring augmented or virtual reality artifacts. The presented work proposes the synthesis of augmented, virtual and mixed reality technologies to provide unified X-Reality experiences in realistic virtual museums, engaging visitors in an interactive and seamless fusion of physical and virtual worlds that will feature virtual agents exhibiting naturalistic behavior. Visitors will be able to interact with the virtual agents, as they would with real world counterparts. The envisioned approach is expected to not only provide refined experiences for museum visitors, but also achieve high quality entertainment combined with more effective knowledge acquisition.
Highlights
Culture is a major connecting tissue of a society, facilitating its links with the past, strengthening its members’ bonds and elevating their quality of life, and allowing them to envision and plan their future
Natural interaction with technology is a much-acclaimed feature that has the potential to ensure optimized user experience, as people can communicate with technology and explore it like they would with any real world artefact: through gestures, expressions, movements, and by looking around and manipulating physical stuff [63]
“realities” to deliver a unique experience that transcends the capacities of each medium individually, and enables users to interact with other museum visitors in the same room while immersed, and to simultaneously enjoy all the benefits offered by both the physical as well as synthetic museum space addressed
Summary
Culture is a major connecting tissue of a society, facilitating its links with the past, strengthening its members’ bonds and elevating their quality of life, and allowing them to envision and plan their future. Museum visitors can be immersed in virtual worlds unravelling in front of them and substituting in a seamless manner the museum’s physical environment Virtual agents in this new world will behave and move naturally, acquiring the potential to directly interact with visitors who will be transformed from passive viewers to keen participants. In particular the contributions of this work are: (i) a conceptual model that can be used as a reference for implementing XR museum experiences which transcend the boundaries between real and virtual interaction in the museum space, (ii) the elaboration of a novel approach, that of “true mediated reality”, which refers to the collective technologies in support of realistic, high-quality human-to-virtual character interactions in cultural heritage contexts, (iii) a tangible case study, illustrating how the proposed conceptual model is materialized.
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