Where Digital Meets Place: Deriving Strategies for Curating Mixed Reality Exhibitions in Public Spaces

Paper Title

Where Digital Meets Place: Deriving Strategies for Curating Mixed Reality Exhibitions in Public Spaces

Publication Info

• Topic area: Mixed Reality (MR) exhibition design in public spaces
• Keywords: Mixed Reality, public spaces, contextualism, curatorial strategies, immersive experiences, interdisciplinary collaboration, spatial storytelling, audience engagement, urban design, MR technology

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing curatorial strategies for MR exhibitions are limited to localized sites such as museums and heritage contexts, offering insufficient guidance for curating born-digital artworks in open public spaces.
• Significance: MR exhibitions in public spaces can enrich cultural engagement, deepen immersion, and make art more accessible, but require new strategies to address spatial, narrative, and interdisciplinary challenges.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have demonstrated MR’s potential for enhancing engagement and storytelling in museums and galleries, but few address distributed, multi-site MR exhibitions in urban environments. This paper builds on contextualist theories to explore curatorial strategies for embedding MR exhibitions in public spaces.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A campus-based MR art exhibition curated using contextualism as the guiding principle, integrating interdisciplinary insights and user feedback to develop curatorial strategies.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of curatorial strategies for embedding MR exhibitions in public spaces.
  2. Application of contextualism to structure MR art exhibition design and spatial integration.
  3. Insights from interdisciplinary experts and general audiences to enhance experiential quality.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Contextual curation: Site selection, spatial analysis, and appraisal to identify suitable exhibition zones.
  • Curatorial design: Thematic grouping, narrative composition, and artwork-space matching.
  • Technical implementation: SLAM-based localization, Unity-based development, and iterative on-site testing.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Positive audience ratings across six experiential dimensions, including engagement (M=4.39) and future usage intent (M=4.49).
  • Experts highlighted the immersive spatial experience, narrative structuring, and integration of digital content with physical environments.
  • Challenges included headset discomfort, tracking reliability, and rendering limitations.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Demonstrated scalability of MR exhibitions beyond museum contexts, with seamless blending of virtual and physical elements in public spaces.
  • Enhanced narrative immersion through walking-based spatial progression and thematic alignment.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Focus group with eight interdisciplinary experts to identify opportunities, challenges, and design strategies.
  • User study with 71 participants, combining questionnaires and interviews to evaluate experiential quality.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited generalizability to diverse public spaces beyond the campus setting.
  • Technical constraints such as tracking reliability and rendering performance.
  • Future research should explore MR exhibitions in varied urban environments and include broader participant demographics.

Summary

This study introduces contextualism as a guiding principle for curating MR exhibitions in public spaces, demonstrated through a campus-based MR art exhibition. By integrating spatial analysis, interdisciplinary collaboration, and user feedback, the research develops strategies for embedding digital content into real-world environments. Findings highlight the potential of MR to deepen immersion and engagement, while addressing challenges such as narrative continuity and technical limitations. Future work should test these strategies in diverse urban contexts to advance MR’s role in public cultural engagement.