User Experience Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Museum Installation for Historic Sailing Ships

Museums and exhibitions can benefit from immersive technologies by embodying visitors in rich interactive environments, where they can experience digitally reconstructed scenes and stories of the past. Nevertheless, the short-term Virtual Reality interaction offered in public spaces needs to be carefully designed in order to communicate the intended message and optimize the delivered experience, especially for first-time users. This paper contributes to the ongoing research on user experience in VR for cultural heritage through the presentation of the design and user evaluation of an installation that immerses users on board of a historic sailing ship and has been part of a museum exhibition. We present the process of reconstructing the ship and developing the application with emphasis on design choices about the user experience (scene presentation, content delivery, navigation and interaction modes, assistance, etc.). We have performed a thorough user experience evaluation and present its results and our reflections on design issues regarding public VR installations for museums.