Evaluating the impact of user and learning experience in three cultural heritage VR applications.

Abstract

Many existing Virtual Reality (VR) applications in the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) domain are for education purposes. As educational VR DCH experiences become more prevalent, it becomes increasingly important to understand the user and learner experience of such installations. This work reports on a user study (n=30) evaluating three educational VR DCH experiences using three existing User experience (UX) evaluation methodologies from related fields and three learning evaluation methodologies. A total of 31 participants were recruited for the experiment, resulting in a dataset of 30 valid records. Our research seeks to explore the relationship between UX and Learning experience (LX), and their impact on learning in VR DCH experiences. Our results suggest that UX and LX in educational VR DCH experiences can influence certain aspects of learning, such as retention, concentration, motivation, and flexibility. Additionally, specific aspects of the educational VR DCH experience captured evidence by three existing UX evaluation and three learning evaluation methodologies are identified. These include instrumental aspects (ease of use, learnability, efficiency, etc.), stimulation of new experiences, the role of interactions, immersion in VR DCH contexts and flexibility of learning pace and using learning materials.