A Quality of Experience Evaluation of an Interactive Multisensory 2.5D Virtual Reality Art Exhibit

In recent years, museums have become more interactive and immersive through the adaptation of technology within large scale art exhibitions. Due to these changes, new types of cultural experiences are more appealing to a younger audience. Despite these positive changes, some museum experiences are still primarily focused on visual art experiences, which remain out of reach to those with visual impairments. Such unimodal and visual dominated experiences restrict these users who depend on sensory feedback to experience the world around them. In this paper, the authors propose a novel VR experience which incorporates multisensory technologies. It allows individuals to engage and interact with a visual artwork museum experience presented as a fully immersive VR environment. Users can interact with virtual paintings and trigger sensory zones which deliver multisensory feedback to the user. These sensory zones are unique to each painting, presenting thematic audio and smells, custom haptic feedback to feel the artwork, and lastly air, light and thermal changes in an effort to engage those with visual impairments.