Virtual museums and audience studies: the case of “Keys To Rome” exhibition

In this paper we present an overview of two audience studies aimed at identifying museum visitors' attitudes, behaviours and expectations. In the framework of V-MUST. NET an interactive exhibition, named “Keys To Rome”, has been organized within the Imperial Fora Museum, Rome. Permanent collection has been integrated with a digital itinerary using computer graphics movies, natural interaction installations, multimedia supports and mobile applications. The evaluation of the audience feedback allowed us to study and justify some interaction choices and communication paradigms made so to enhance the user experience and enabling a fruitful discussion around virtual museums dissemination into cultural heritage environments. What came out is the need for technology to remain invisible and grant a cross-referencing visit path in a continuous parallelism between real objects and their digital copies.