A historic site and museum guide system based on wearable mixed reality: effects on students' situational interest

This study proposed a mixed reality (MR)-based wearable guide system that enables students to learn MR virtual materials found throughout their real-world surroundings. This system adopted the HoloLens to realize a MR learning environment for facilitating hands-free use and avoiding interference with students' attention while walking around a historic site or museum. The goal of this study focuses on whether the MR-based wearable guide system is capable of raising students' situational interest when it is used in historic site and museum education The situational interest scale, which consists of novelty, challenge, attention demand, instant enjoyment, exploration intention and total interest, is adopted to measure the learning interest of the students towards the proposed system. This study employed two museums as its research site and examined a total of 30 university students. The experimental results of this study indicated that situational interest has a positive effect, especially total interest and novelty dimensions. Therefore, the proposed system was able to effectively offer the feeling of freshness to the students and enhance their engagement when they encounter learning activities in a museum environment. For such informal learning environments, we believe that the proposed system can strengthen the interaction and the immersive perception between visitors and exhibition items.