What role do Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) play in engaging visitors of cultural heritage? What do visitors prefer? Why? Can we design for 3D reconstructions to be part of the visit rather than separated experiences? These are some of the questions I wanted to answer by testing and comparing Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) within two very different heritage settings: Dr Edward Jenner’s House Museum and Garden in Barkley, UK, and the remains of the Forum or Augustus now displayed at the Trajan Markets in Rome, Italy.
Both VR and AR engage visitors with visions of the past to be consumed as an immersive experience (e.g. moving within a building in VR) or as an overlapping of the past on today’s world (e.g. graphics onto real views from the camera phone in AR). Both have pros and cons: VR is highly impactful as it immerses the viewer in the past but isolate them from their group; AR is social, playful, but does not give the same immersive, emotional experience as VR. My research aims to understand the use of 3D reconstructions as part of a visit to a heritage site.
The 3D reconstructions and the narratives were extracted by two VR videogames developed as part of the EU H2020 project REVEAL: “The Chantry” and “A night in the Forum”. I used two different devices (a tablet that provides an augmented reality (AR) overlapping the reconstructions in the real world and a headset that immerses the visitor in the past via a virtual reality (VR) experience) and invited visitors and professionals to try both and tell me what they thought.
The findings highlight the experiential response to VR (visceral, embodied, subjective) vs the rational response to AR (cognitive, comparative, objective). The high-quality realism of the reconstructed space and the details of the furniture and objects are essential for the experience. The narrative should be crafted for the specific space as engaging mini-stories acted out but still rooted in history and evidence.
Managing VR and AR depends on the heritage settings: in a very large museum such as the Trajan Markets it is unpractical to hand out devices while interactive stations in place are a more effective solutions; in a small museum such as Dr Jenner’s House Museum the visitors can take the device with them for an immersive visit.
