A case study on the effect of narrative in augmented reality experiences in museums

Sammanfattning: With the increasing popularity of using Augmented Reality (AR) as a new medium in museums, this thesis presented an empirical study to examine the visitors’ sense of presence in two types of AR experiences in museums, "informative" and "narrative". We developed two prototypes, both of which focused on delivering complementary information about a famous head statue at Medelhavsmuseet (the Mediterranean Museum of Stockholm). The "narrative" prototype brought the statue to life with a reconstructive appearance and a voice and allowed it to tell visitors its stories from a first-person perspective. On the other hand, the "informative" prototype presented objective facts by points from a third-person perspective. A series of user studies with 12 participants were conducted at Medelhavsmuseet where the participants reported their sense of presence in two respective conditions through a post-experiment questionnaire together with a semi-structured interview. The results suggested that participants barely experienced presence in the "informative" con- dition, while they experienced presence to a "moderately sufficient" degree in the "narrative" condition. This document reports the impacts of "narrative" on specific aspects of presence. Overall, narrative increased the participants’ sense of presence and the heightened presence had positive impacts on their attitudes towards the experience. However, this study also presented the negative effects (e.g., preference, learning effectiveness) that might be caused by a high sense of presence. This report discusses the observed relationships of other factors with the presence (e.g., age). Finally, directions for future studies were pointed out with respect to the improvements and extensions of the current work.