A Comparative Study of Virtual and Mixed Reality Blended Environments for Interacting with the Physical World During Virtual Guided Visits
Michele De Bonis, Huyen N. Nguyen, Patrick Bourdot · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2025
We propose in this paper a Mixed Reality (MR) blending technique based on Point-of-Interest (PoI) alignment, designed to map differently shaped virtual environments onto a physical space. The primary application is to support remote guided visits to cultural heritage sites. The technique is grounded around three core principles: maintaining spatial coherence, enabling natural user movement, and allowing interaction with real objects. We compared this technique with a Virtual Reality (VR) setup that includes similar spatial alignment but excludes visual access to the physical world. A user study involving 17 participants was conducted across two scenarios: a virtual museum and an archaeological site. A portal-based navigation technique allowed the participants to access to various PoIs and get information about different artefacts. The participants could take notes during the visits: hand drawing on a virtual tablet in the VR condition and writing with a pen on a notebook in the MR environment. Results indicate that the blending technique supports manual dexterity and physical interaction without diminishing the sense of presence. The integration of physical objects also provides ergonomic flexibility and interaction flexibility which are often limited in VR-experiences. These findings suggest that the PoI-based blending approach holds potentials for cultural heritage applications, particularly for museum pre-visits and remote exploration of inaccessible sites.