Cybernarium Days 2002-A public experience of virtual and augmented worlds

Are Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) well suited for entertaining and educating a lay audience? In this paper we try to find an answer to this question and work out the conditions and requirements for successful installations. We will describe our "test bed", the Cybernarium Days 2002, the world's first public exhibition exclusively dedicated to Virtual and Augmented Reality, which attracted more than 10.000 visitors in 6 days. We also present the results of the user questioning, which took place during the exhibition, and the "lessons learnt". Furthermore we focus on software aspects, which enabled us to use low cost hardware and offered a way to build new exhibits in a short time. Since the raise or fall of a VR/AR installation is mainly influenced by its user interface, we present a classification scheme for devices and outline their advantages and disadvantages, offering other VR/AR-developers a guideline for their work on public VR/AR-exhibits.