Augmenting Local and Remote Cultural Visits with Mixed Reality

Abstract

With the rapid evolution of technology in the last decades came the possibility of executing certain activities remotely. Museum and gallery visits can greatly benefit from remote interaction and can be enhanced by visitor participation and collaboration. The pandemic setting contributed to the active search for its implementation in several areas of society. The framework presented in this paper aims to tackle both of the aforementioned opportunities instantiated by companion and collaborative virtual and augmented reality applications. The first application was built for Oculus Quest devices and serves as a means to immerse the user and provide a sense of presence in remote visits. The second is a smartphone application meant to augment the onsite visitor experience with digital information and the possibility for commenting and annotating the visit. The latter application can also stream a camera perspective to the virtual environment accessible in the first application, enabling a sense of participation and presence in the physical exhibit, to the to the virtual visitor . The system's usability and presence were evaluated in a series of questionnaires performed by a variety of participants.