Multisensory Augmented Reality in Cultural Heritage: Impact of Different Stimuli on Presence, Enjoyment, Knowledge and Value of the Experience

Abstract

Little is known about the impact of the addition of each stimulus in multisensory augmented reality experiences in cultural heritage contexts. This paper investigates the impact of different sensory conditions on a user’s sense of presence, enjoyment, knowledge about the cultural site, and value of the experience. Five different multisensory conditions, namely, Visual, Visual + Audio, Visual + Smell, and Visual + Audio + Smell conditions, and regular visit referred to as None condition, were evaluated by a total of 60 random visitors distributed across the specified conditions. According to the results, the addition of particular types of stimuli created a different impact on the sense of presence subscale scores, namely, on spatial presence, involvement, and experienced realism, but did not influence the overall presence score. Overall, the results revealed that the addition of stimuli improved enjoyment and knowledge scores and did not affect the value of the experience scores. We concluded that each stimulus has a differential impact on the studied variables, demonstrating that its usage should depend on the goal of the experience: smell should be used to privilege realism and spatial presence, while audio should be adopted when the goal is to elicit involvement.