The research aims for investigating the mixed reality technology as tool for supporting the museums¿ mission and enhancing the visitors' experience.
The research deals with the current challenges of museum domain: the need for better understanding museum audience and for developing tools and services tailored on visitors' needs and preferences, taking advantage from the developments in ICT.
Through the ethnographic investigation and the Service Design Thinking methodology, the research will provide a comprehensive description of the visitor experience connected with different kinds of mixed reality technology.
By superimposing virtual objects on the reality (Augmented Reality) or by creating synthetic virtual environments (Virtual Reality), this kind of technologies allow the museums to better communicate the heritage-related information and engage the visitors.
The use of such new technologies should not be regarded as replacement of the more traditional means to disseminate information, but instead as a further way to promote the cultural heritage and to engage visitors with exhibits and artifacts (Heat & Vom Lehn, 2008).
But introducing new technologies not always means an improvement in the quality of the visitor experience. Indeed, the value of the technologies does not rely on the technical properties of the tool, rather it depends on the benefit perceived by the person who uses them in a specific context to reach specific goals (Triberti & Brivio, 2016).
As pointed out by Kaufmann (2003), the matter is not questioning whether or not mixed reality is useful to enhance the museum experience, the matter is understanding how to effectively exploit its potential.
For this reason, the proposed research will investigate the visitor experience as resulting from the interaction with mixed reality technology in the museums, and provide a comprehensive classification of existing solutions.
The innovativeness of the research relies on its objectives and methodology.
The attempt to classify the mixed reality technology is needed to understand its potential applications, according to their features, the way they are implemented in the museum context, and the kinds of experience they enable.
Until now, only few contributions are available: Milgram and Kishino (1994) who proposed the first taxonomy of mixed reality based on the display devices; Carmigniani and colleagues (2011) analyzed existing technologies based on the devices, the tracking systems and the fields of application - including a brief description of solutions applied to cultural contexts; Santos and colleagues (2014) provided a review on Augmented Reality prototypes for learning experiences, by analyzing the design process and the evaluation methods.
Beside those interesting contributions, a more updated and comprehensive classification is missing.
Although much has been written about mixed reality in the cultural heritage context, the literature available seems fragmented and project-specific.
To this end, the proposed research is based on a holistic perspective that considers jointly the visitors (i.e. previous experiences, interests, motivations), the technology (features, contents) and the museum context (i.e. mission and strategies, morphology of space, exhibit and collection) to analyze the quality of the experience.
Thanks to this research, museum staff and designers can have an overview of the current solutions as well as the future trends, in order to better plan and develop effective solutions.
This research will also contribute to the knowledge development by applying the Service Design Thinking methodology (Stickdorn et al., 2011). It includes methods and tools for the data analysis that produce models of the user experience and foster insights for the design or re-design of technological solutions.
To sum up, the research is grounded on traditional frameworks to study the visitor experience and the interaction with the technology. But it goes beyond the traditional approach to make it valuable for a design perspective.