VR in academia

Carrozzino, M., and M. Bergamasco. 2010. "Beyond virtual museums: Experiencing immersive virtual reality in real museums." Journal of Cultural Heritage 11 (4): 452-458. doi: 10.1016/j.culher.2010.04.001.

Abstract

• The authors discuss the implementation of VR in a growing cultural heritage industry. In doing so, they propose a classification of VR devices based on an 'interaction axis' and one an 'immersion axis'

• These axes combine into a graph by which they can categorize VR systems comparatively;

• The systems they discuss are big metal VR environments in different museum settings: the Museum of Pure Form, the Virtual Museum of Sculpture, Virtual Exploration of Turandot stage, and Virtual Livorno. The authors also performed (ad-hoc and somewhat randomized) user-studies (not for each environment) using survey to assess how people experienced these different environments (usually positive, though numbers vary-- see Fig. 3).

• Targeted audience: youngsters in museums:

  • Meaningful and pleasant experience, learnt in a short time (to prevent learning), and intuitive

  • Some problems: VR is expensive (museums are poor), requires specialist staff for content creation (ibid.), require much space (immersive) or cumbersome (gear), lonely experience (no coop in many VR applications), 'Guggenheim effect': VR becomes more important than museum exhibit

Fig. 1. Classification of VR devices on the interaction axis.

Fig. 3. The presented VR systems in the proposed classification.

Evaluation

• No particular discussion of software, platform, or hardware specs.

• Also no clarification as to why these systems were chosen.

• Overall conclusions were positive on VR side, though nothing on particular combinations of hardware/software. Provide predictions of future tech solving a number of issues mentioned in the abstract (above).