Abstract:

Virtual technologies have proved be a valuable support for the knowledge and fruition of the Cultural Heritage. The way they are employed shapes the affection and emotional involvement of the public to which the experience is addressed. On one side, Cultural Heritage represents the historical legacy of a group of people; on the other side, it is also something constantly changing, a process of social appropriation of cultural identity.

Features like interactivity, storytelling and sensory immersion are typical of virtual environments; they lend themselves well to the field of Cultural Heritage because:
- they create the right conditions for a fruitful learning experience which "alert" many receptive channels; the latter stimulate strong emotions that allow creating mental connections between what we see, what we feel and what we have in our memory.
- they also provide physical or simulated mobility that stands at the basis of any informal learning experience (so said learn-by-doing); in this sense, natural interaction applications and tangible interfaces are designed to let the user feel more embodied in the virtual space;
- they make curiosity and interest arise in a spontaneous form, gradually shaping the memory and the understanding of what we are experiencing.
From these premises, the Virtual Museum of the Tiber Valley project has been used as case study to conduct an user experience evaluation.

This virtual immersive installation, today located at the Villa Giulia Museum, in Rome, uses gesture-based interaction and offers an overview on the historical, cultural and geological evolution of the territory of the Tiber Valley: the latter is indeed told establishing interconnections among geography, geology, archaeology, architecture, botany, history, literature, mythology, art.

The experiential model we have envisioned for the Tiber Valley experience puts the user, so the student, at the centre of the experiential context, ideally immersed in an ongoing "tension" between feelings and thoughts, actions and observations.

The aims of the evaluation have been thus to:
(a) test the degree of attention that high school students have implied during the interactive experience,
(b) to analyze what kind of information could be sedimented in their mind while using the installation and exploring the different scenarios; finally,
(c) to study the level of elaboration of what they have just heard or seen.

The challenge has been also to compare the evaluation’s results between students who tried the immersive installation with a guide, following a complete formative programme (neutral group) with others not having any preliminary information about the system and the content (control group).

In total, we have investigated 230 students from both groups. An individual questionnaire has been submitted to each of them. Observations made by operators and direct feedback have been also taken into account for the final resumè.

Results confirm the general appreciation toward this kind of immersive installation. Attention is certainly captured within the museum context, given the intimate situation of the room where the Tiber Valley project has been set up, the soundscape and the storytelling. Contents collect positive feedback regarding the quantity of memorized information and the quality too. Elaboration is highly performed even if usability issues and timing connected to the stories have been told negatively affected the experience of some students.

Keywords:

User experience, user evaluation, informal learning, virtual environment, experiential model.