Studying Users' Acceptability Towards 3D Immersive Environments - Virtual Tours: A Case Study

If information is considered the key in today’s information society, then museums and heritage sites are of critical importance as they are places for knowledge to be shared and experienced by individuals. For this reason, presenting and distributing information through ICT forms could play a critical role for the museum in order to empower the public in their understanding of the past. The view of using ICT contextualisation mechanisms, such as 3D immersive virtual environment, in museums and heritage sites is explored in this research. Hence, this paper describes efforts towards exploring the acceptability of the interfaces and interaction techniques for Virtual Tours. We acknowledge the difficulty of the task as 3D immersive environment do not have defined interfaces nor visitor are believed to have replicable experiences. However, we believe that a significant amount of studies of this type might provide some answers to a field full of expectations but not enough experience in the ICT field.