Redefining the Digital Paradigm for Virtual Museums

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated the digitization of services. As physical spaces become harder to access, there is a growing shift towards the use of virtual spaces for remote work, education and entertainment. In 2020, brick-and-mortar spaces like museums, art exhibits and galleries were especially affected by a lack of visitors. Shifting to a virtual medium would allow these entities to reach out and retain visitors more effectively. However, the use of virtual spaces to support these kinds of services is still quite under-explored. Presence, engagement and a real connection are difficult to establish through virtual exhibits. To explore these challenges, we partnered with the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh and created a web-based 3D virtual museum to represent three of their historical galleries. Each virtual gallery has a different presentation modality - “self-guided”, “avatar-guided” and “game-based”. We sought to explain which of these artifact presentation modes led to the best performance in learnability, usability and engagement by conducting a user study. Our findings and user feedback are presented in this paper. We hope that these findings will be useful for designing virtual experiences that can allow users to learn and engage with virtual artifacts as effectively as they would with real-world ones.