Human-Centric Virtual Museum: Redefining the Museum Experience Through Immersive and Interactive Environments

Virtual Museums present a novel approach for audiences to experience cultural content. This paper proposes two new concepts of virtual museums: Human-Centric Virtual Museum, which emphasizes audience interaction experiences, and Content-Centric Virtual Museum, which focuses more on the digitized display of real museum collections and content. With the widespread application of extended reality (XR) technology in this field, people are increasingly inclined towards experiencing highly interactive Human-Centric Virtual Museums. However, evaluating these from a user cognition perspective warrants further investigation. To address this, we design and implement three fundamental forms: Mobile Application (MA), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR), and evaluate comprehensive user experiences, including satisfaction, cognitive load, emotional involvement, presence, interactivity, degree of participation and potential negative impact. The experimental results show that in terms of satisfaction and cognitive load, users generally find the MR mode easier to understand and operate. Regarding emotional involvement, audiences in the VR and MR modes are more likely to focus on the current content. Concerning presence, the MR mode enables audiences to perceive the real spatial location, thereby increasing their immersion. Furthermore, compared to the MA mode, both MR and VR modes exhibit stronger interactivity, providing audiences with a more immersive exhibition experience. However, the VR mode may also cause users to feel discomfort during use.