Fostering Virtual Guide in Exhibitions

Museums are essential to make culture accessible to the mass audience. Human museum guides are important to explain the presented artifacts to the visitors. Recently, museums started to experiment with enhancing exhibitions through mixed reality. It enables cultural exhibitors to provide each visitor with an individualized virtual guide that adapts to the visitor's interests. The effect of the presence and appearance of a virtual museum guide is, however, unclear. In this paper, we compare a real-world guide with a realistic, an abstract, and an audio-only representation of the virtual guide. Participants followed four multimodal presentations while we investigated the effect on comprehension and perceived co-presence. We found that a realistic representation of a virtual guide increases the perceived co-presence and does not adversely affect the comprehension of learning content in mixed reality exhibitions. Insights from our study inform the design of virtual guides for real-world exhibitions.