Designing and evaluating an immersive VR experience of a historic sailing ship in museum contexts

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, public-space Virtual Reality (VR) interactions need to be short in duration, carefully designed to communicate the intended message, and optimized for the user 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 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. • Historic ship reconstructed in VR using photogrammetry and laser scanning. • Developed realistic simulation of ship buoyancy, sail deformation, and motion. • Context-aware interactions designed for first-time museum VR visitors. • Evaluated user experience and sense of presence in lab and museum settings. • Guidelines for balancing realism, usability and learning in public VR exhibits.