Design and Evaluation of a Distance-Driven User Interface for Asynchronous Collaborative Exhibit Browsing in an Augmented Reality Museum

Augmented reality museums allow visitors to jointly view and interact with exhibits. However, real-time exhibit browsing does not accommodate latecomers to museums and offers limited support to temporally separated visitors. To stimulate asynchronous exhibit browsing, we developed a distance-driven user interface that divided the augmented reality exhibit-egocentric space into four distance ranges, each having a set of social networking features and different privileges for exhibit viewing and interaction. The user interface enables asynchronous exhibit browsing for visitors participating at different times. We conducted empirical studies to evaluate how the user interface affected visitors’ collaborative exhibit browsing in terms of perceived usability and learning gains. The results show that the perceived usability of the user interface is consistently high across all distance ranges. The user interface stimulates collaborative exhibit browsing with significant improvements in learning efficiency and learning attention durations, although learning satisfaction showed no difference across the participants. Implications for how the distance-driven user interface can be generalised for other interactive applications are discussed.