Mixed reality applications can enrich museum exhibits and make them more attractive to an audience of adolescents. However, in the design of such applications, we face a myriad of possibilities and little guidance on how to choose between (early) alternatives. In this paper, we explore the notion of experience blend - which could act as an aesthetic governing the design of mixed reality experiences. We present an effort to operationalize experience blend and illustrate its use in the design and evaluation of an application for an art museum. Stakeholders in the project assumed that in order to reach out to adolescents an exciting experience was needed, deviating from education and breaking with the hidden rules of the art-museum, our user study showed that adolescents favored a blended experience. This suggests experience blend may be a helpful aesthetic in the design of other mixed reality experiences.
Citation
Vera Lange, Marleen van Beuzekom, Michel Hansma, Jasper Jeurens, Willemiek van den Oever, Marjolein Regterschot, Jille Treffers, Koen van Turnhout, Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen, Ido Iurgel, and René Bakker. 2019. Blending into the White Box of the Art Museum. In Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019 (HTTF 2019), November 19–20, 2019, Nottingham, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3363384.3363469