VirtuNarrator: Crafting museum narratives via spatial layout in creating customized virtual museums

Curation in museums involves not only presenting exhibits for visitors but also deeply shaping a systematic narrative experience through deliberate spatial layout design of the museum space. In contrast, the dynamic nature of virtual reality (VR) environments establishes virtual museums as a more potent space for both layout optimization and narrative construction, particularly when integrating visitors’ diverse preferences to optimize the virtual museum and convey narratives. Therefore, we first collaborated with experienced curators to conduct a formative study to understand the workflow of curation and summarize the museum narratives that weave exhibits, galleries, and museum architecture into a compelling story. We then proposed a museum spatial layout framework that clarified three narrative levels (exhibit level, gallery level, and architecture level) to support the controllable spatial layout of the museum’s elements. Based on that, we developed VirtuNarrator, a proof-of-concept prototype designed to assist visitors in choosing different narrative themes, filtering exhibits, creating and adjusting galleries, and freely connecting them. The evaluation results validated that visitors received a more systematic museum narrative experience and perceptions of multi-perspective narrative design in VirtuNarrator. We also provided insights into VR-based museum narrative enhancement beyond spatial layout design.