Evaluation of an HMD-Based Multisensory Virtual Museum Experience for Enhancing Sense of Presence

Advancements in digital technology have enabled the production of head-mounted display (HMD) -based digital cultural heritage virtual reality contents that provide immersive experiences through audiovisual interaction in a three-dimensional virtual space. However, these contents do not support tactile sensations and only provide audiovisual information using a controller, which limits users’ perception of cultural assets. In this study, we propose an HMD virtual reality-based multisensory digital cultural heritage content that increases the feeling of presence by giving tactile sensations in addition to auditory and visual senses. We present a virtual museum content that implements dummy objects and virtual objects that are 3D printed by high-precision scanning of artifacts and connects their locations with sensors so that users can touch and move them in various directions to feel their shape and size and enhance the sense of reality. Thirty-two participants were recruited to conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations on realism, immersion, and preference, to compare the proposed multisensory method with the traditional audiovisual method. The experimental results showed that the HMD-based multisensory virtual museum enhanced realism, as users can naturally touch the dummy and feel the presence of artifacts through bare-hand interaction and that immersion and preference are enhanced through the novel multisensory experience.