VISITOR EXPERIENCE IN GOOGLE ART PROJECT AND IN SECOND LIFE-BASED VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The advances of interactive 3D technologies and the rapid expansion of the Internet have led to the development of a wide variety of solutions for the dissemination of cultural heritage using digital technologies. One such promising approach are Virtual Museums, i.e. digital environments for the presentation of exhibit collections. Currently one may identify two distinct trends in Virtual Museums: exhibition spaces built in Virtual Worlds such as Second Life, and the Google Art Project. A common characteristic of these approaches is that they both aim to replicate the experience of visiting the physical museum space and observing the exhibits. However, looking deeper into several aspects of their interface, one can notice significant differences: modelled vs digitized exhibition space, low-res vs hi-res image presentation, single- vs multi-user visiting experience, static vs interactive exhibits, etc. The aim of our research is to compare the two environments in terms of their effect on the visiting experience and to attempt to identify the critical design features that contribute mostly to the experience. We have setup a study for the comparative evaluation of the two approaches based on the visiting experience of the same exhibition space. We have selected a museum wing already present in the Google Art Project (the 5th floor of the Museum of Modern Art of New York - MoMA) and modelled a replicate of it in OpenSimulator, an open source alternative to Second Life. The analysis of the results indicate that both approaches have been found attractive by the users, but for different reasons, and led to the identification of a number of features that positively affected the experience and have been considered important by the participants.