Evaluating the impact of passive physical everyday tools on interacting with virtual reality museum objects

Museums are increasingly embracing new methods and technologies to enhance the visitor experience. Virtual Reality (VR) provides the opportunity to experience objects and situations that are not readily available or don’t otherwise exist making it well suited to museum applications. Museum visitors represent an ultra-diverse cohort with technology experience levels ranging from first-time users through to experts, and typically needing to interact with the exhibit with little to no induction and training, and in many instances as a once off encounter. To support such users, this paper evaluates the impact of passive physical everyday tools to provide passive haptic feedback and enhance user interaction with desk-top sized museum objects. Museums face challenges in exhibiting larger objects and in this work the cargo area of a utility vehicle (i.e. ute) was selected as contextually suitable larger object. Three different interaction techniques are used with and without everyday physical tools and experiments undertaken to investigate the impact of the physical tools on the usability and user experience with free-hand interaction techniques. A comparison between using the passive physical tool for the interaction technique and without showed improved efficiency for two of the techniques and positive impact on the user experience with the mechanically more complex of the interaction techniques. These insights may prove useful in the design of interaction techniques for enhanced free-hand interaction with museum objects in VR.