Investigating Design and Evaluation Guidelines for Interactive Presentation of Visual Art

Abstract

Many of current applications for digital art presentation are built by creating a virtual environment, which aims to mimic the look and feel of a common real world exhibition space. Such attempts to imitate existing spaces are more or less unsuccessful and do not support the imagination of the user, nor do they provide an opportunity for a different experience from that in the real-world. Furthermore, presentation environment affects the art perception. Specifically designed exhibition spaces and interactive elements can aid and enhance the viewer’s experience. The design, form and colour of the artwork’s environment can influence the impact that it has on the viewer, especially in digital art presentation. A major role in how paintings are perceived in a virtual environment is played by not only the exhibited surrounding but also the interaction enabled within the application. What type of interaction contributes towards user engagement with the content presented and the application itself? How does interactivity aid digital art display and what types of interactivity are better suited for presentation of visual content? What types of paintings are most suitable to be presented in a virtual exhibition space? These are some of the questions raised and discussed in this chapter. Through two qualitative studies, we investigate how four different interactivity modes can aid towards user engagement and its different phases. Design guidelines for the virtual exhibition space are gathered as well as a list of suggested improvements for the interactivity tasks in the different modes. Moreover, the experts that took part in both focus group studies agreed with our proposed extended framework on user engagement with its different phases and the suggested metrics for their evaluation.