Museums are traditionally considered learning environments and are ordinarily used for non-formal education. Physical museums, while being irreplaceable, are limited to a physical space, requiring mobility and physical presence. In addition, traditional exhibitions are not designed for interaction and physical exploration of artefacts. With the focus being shifted from museum exhibits to visitors’ experience, utilization of emerging technologies and co-creation of virtual museums not only helps in preservation of cultural heritage, but enhances the dissemination, engagement, and experience, while addressing the mobility and the plurality of voices and perspectives represented. In this work, we designed and developed the School House Virtual Museum with tangible user interfaces based on participatory, interdisciplinary, and co-creative methods with students and a larger community of researchers, artists, and practitioners working on heritage and memory. In a user study with 62 participants, usability and user experience were explored and the potential contribution of such virtual museums to learning, based on critical, cross-disciplinary, and participatory dialogue, both in cultural and educational institutions/programs has been investigated. The results have confirmed that the system has been well designed and developed, and the user experience was largely positive. The responses from educators and students confirmed that the application holds potential as a learning and education tool in either museums, schools, or when used independently.

Virtual Reality is used for creating immersive experiences with rich interactions in many application domains, from video games, simulations, and training, to cultural heritage and educational applications. Taking advantage of this technology, the experience in traditional museums can be enhanced with digital content, the museum or their collections can be replicated for remote visitors, or entirely new virtual museums can be created. In this paper, a demo of a multi-modal virtual museum is presented and interaction discussed from the point of view of a consumer and a virtual museum creator.

With the increasing prevalence of educational eXtended Reality (XR) Cultural Heritage (CH) experiences, it becomes increasingly important to understand the user, and learner, experience of such installations and develop bespoke methodologies to capture and evaluate these experiences. Our work aims to expand the existing knowledge of User Experience (UX) in CH incorporating XR, especially for educational aspects inside, by displaying and analysing UX understanding and evaluation methods. Through investigation and research on UX work of applications described from various sources, this paper summarises the current trends, limitations, and challenges of UX evaluation in this field and represents the direction of future work.

In this paper we present details of a virtual tour and game for VR headset that are designed to investigate an interactive and engaging approach of applying VR to student recruitment for an undergraduate course. The VR tour employs a floating menu to navigate through a set of 360° panoramic photographs of the teaching environment and uses hotspot interaction to display further information about the course. The VR game is a fast-paced shooting game. The course information is embedded on cubes that the player needs to focus on and destroy. The game experience is expected to generate an engaging way to promote the course. This work in progress outlines the concept and development of the prototype, and discusses the next stages of testing in order to evaluate the effectiveness of applying VR to undergraduate student recruitment.

In this paper we present details of a virtual tour and game for VR headset that are designed to investigate an interactive and engaging approach of applying VR to student recruitment for an undergraduate course. The VR tour employs a floating menu to navigate through a set of 360° panoramic photographs of the teaching environment and uses hotspot interaction to display further information about the course. The VR game is a fast-paced shooting game. The course information is embedded on cubes that the player needs to focus on and destroy. The game experience is expected to generate an engaging way to promote the course. This work in progress outlines the concept and development of the prototype, and discusses the next stages of testing in order to evaluate the effectiveness of applying VR to undergraduate student recruitment.

Virtual museums are an important medium for the preservation and dissemination of tangible and intangible cultural heritage as well as for education and public engagement. This is even more important now that focus is being shifted from museum exhibits to the visitors’ experience and the increased attention given to their mobility, and the plurality of voices and perspectives represented. To enhance experience and participation new techniques are being developed and multiple senses stimulated. This paper offers venues to unpack the potentials of VR as a pedagogic vehicle when creative and cross-disciplinary experimentation is employed in and around digital museums. Grounded in a particular site of memory, and co-produced with a ‘post-memory generation’, the School House Virtual Museum is associated with private and silenced memories of past civic resistance in Kosovo. Using written and orally narrated stories, images, videos and immersion within a virtually reconstructed physical space, the experience offers a means to explore spaces, narratives, and technologies relevant to a particular cultural memory and heritage. The main aim of the user study, with 37 participants presented in this work, was to investigate the design of the system, focusing on three aspects: usability, User Experience (UX) and education, and the effect of the tangible interface provided to one user group. The results are overall very positive and confirm that the UX holds potential as a learning and education tool whether in museums, schools, or when used independently.

Interval recognition is an important part of ear training—the key aspect of music education. Once trained, the musician can identify pitches, melodies, chords, and rhythms by listening to music segments. In a conventional setting, the tutor would teach a trainee the intervals using a musical instrument, typically a piano. However, this is expensive, time consuming, and nonengaging for either party. With the emergence of new technologies, including virtual reality (VR) and areas such as edutainment, this and similar trainings can be transformed into more engaging, more accessible, customizable (virtual) environments, with the addition of new cues and bespoke progression settings. In this work, we designed and implemented a VR ear training system for interval recognition. The usability, user experience, and the effect of multimodal integration through the addition of a perceptual cue, spatial audio, was investigated in two experiments with 46 participants. The results show that the system is highly acceptable and provides a very good experience for users. Furthermore, we show that the added spatial auditory cues provided in the VR application give users significantly more information for judging the musical intervals, something that is not possible in a non-VR environment.

Presentations of virtual cultural heritage artifacts are often communicated via the medium of interactive digital storytelling. The synergy of a storied narrative embedded within a 3D virtual reconstruction context has high consumer appeal and edutainment value. We investigate if 360° videos presented through virtual reality further contribute to user immersion for the application of preserving intangible cultural heritage. A case study then analyzes whether conventional desktop media is significantly different from virtual reality as a medium for immersion in intangible heritage contexts. The case study describes bridge diving at Stari Most, the old bridge in Mostar Bosnia. This application aims to present and preserve the bridge diving tradition at this site. The project describes the site and history along with cultural connections, and a series of quiz questions are presented after viewing all of the materials. Successful completion of the quiz allows a user to participate in a virtual bridge dive. The subjective evaluation provided evidence to suggest that our method is successful in preserving intangible heritage and communicating ideas in key areas of concern for this heritage that can be used to develop a preservation framework in the future. It was also possible to conclude that experience within the virtual reality framework did not affect effort expectancy for the web application, but the same experience significantly influenced the performance expectancy construct.

The goal of psychometric scaling is the quantification of perceptual experiences, understanding the relationship between an external stimulus, the internal representation and the response. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework to fuse the outcome of different psychophysical experimental protocols, namely rating and pairwise comparisons experiments. Such a method can be used for merging existing datasets of subjective nature and for experiments in which both measurements are collected. We analyze and compare the outcomes of both types of experimental protocols in terms of time and accuracy in a set of simulations and experiments with benchmark and real-world image quality assessment datasets, showing the necessity of scaling and the advantages of each protocol and mixing. Although most of our examples focus on image quality assessment, our findings generalize to any other subjective quality-of-experience task.

Ear training is a vital element in music education, analogous to taking dictation in written language. It provides musicians with a crucial skill used to identify pitches, melodies, chords and rhythms. Traditionally, the training is conducted by a tutor using a musical instrument, typically a piano. However, with new technologies emerging, several computer applications to facilitate this aspect of music education have been developed. Nevertheless, none of them utilised the VR technology, that proved to be successful in various scenarios, including educational systems, simulations, etc. In this work, we designed and developed a virtual reality ear training system for interval recognition and investigated its usability and user experience and the effect of spatialised audio in a 3D virtual environment on user performance. The results showed that the system has been successfully designed and provides users with a great experience when using it.

Interactive digital storytelling has become a popular method for virtual cultural heritage presentations. Combinations of stories and 3D virtual reconstructions are attractive for the audience and have high edutainment values. In this paper we investigate if 360◦ VR videos further contribute to user immersion in the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. It describes a case study of the Mostar bridge diving project, aimed to present and preserve the bridge diving tradition from the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a virtual reality application which enables the user to virtually jump off the bridge after watching 360◦ video stories about its history and the bridge diving tradition and upon successfully completing the quiz evaluation of the knowledge gained from the stories. The user experience evaluation study shows that our method was successful in preserving a form of intangible heritage and posits suggestions that can be used in developing an intangible heritage preservation framework.