An Evaluation of the Effects of a Virtual Museum on Users’ Attitudes towards Cultural Heritage
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors, many thanks for reporting about your interesting study. Please let me provide some feedback / suggestions.
- Relevance: The topic is highly relevant and positioned in a currently still limited covered field.
- SOTA: Relevant publications cited, but especially more recent discourses are sometimes missing - e.g. with regards to digitization technologies or XR. Some suggestions:
Russo, M. (2021). AR in the Architecture Domain: State of the Art. Applied Sciences, 11, 6800. doi:10.3390/app11156800
Paliou, E. (2018). Visual Perception in Past Built Environments: Theoretical and Procedural Issues in the Archaeological Application of Three-Dimensional Visibility Analysis. In C. Siart, M. Forbriger, & O. Bubenzer (Eds.), Digital Geoarchaeology: New Techniques for Interdisciplinary Human-Environmental Research (pp. 65–80). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Champion, E. (2021). Virtual Heritage. A Guide (E. Champion Ed.). London: Ubiquity Press.
- Study design: The methodology is mostly well explained and sufficient, but not in all cases came fully clear to me. Some remarks: I am wondering how this sample was constructed and if there may be a bias e.g. with regards to the used media channel. E.g.: How many people got invited, what other demographic factors has been investigated / checked beside age & gender? Please correct "%" for age at p. 6. Also an age range or cohort information seems more interesting than the SD value in order to better assess the "digital divide". Given these potential biases I would suggest to discuss potential sources of error / biasing a bit more in the section about limitations. Since you are dealing with personal data, I would suggest to also extend the discussion of ethic concerns e.g. with regards of data handling (e.g. anonymization / pseudonymisation).
- Results: Results are clearly described and illustrated, although I would like to suggest to include a graph providing overview about all investigated factors and their linking. Beside the possible influence of hardware on results you have mentioned in the limitations section, another question to me concerning this type of studies is how you ensure that the retrieved effect is not biased by the application & content UX design. In other words: Would your results be reproducible in case you change the UX (e.g. LoD, freedom degrees for interaction) of the interactive website and/or virtual museum? And what findings of your studies would be therefore generalizable beyond your specific setting? Maybe it would be worth to show how you handled the possible effect of UX design on your study outputs and/or mention to which extend results may be transferable to other studies?
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment.
Thanks for your time.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
As I understand from this work, the paper analyses different approaches to check the effectiveness of digital museum (3D Vs inmersiveness) in the expected reaction and attitude of users related to Cultural Heritage. The authors analyses different criteria (presence, attitude) in two scenarios ( web Vs 3DVR). The experiment is done using (SUS-like) questionnaires with a statistical analysis.
I seem that the conclusions are vague relating to the initial purpose (hypothesis), and also the way of writing it is also confusing. Potential readers may have similar problem (so many statistical information, with not clear objectives and results). I may suggest clear objetives and hypotheses (some parts of section 1 and 2.1 are less interesting) and better conclusions (related to a qualitative study), perhaps open questions and suggestions may be helpful to understand the real "attitude" of users.
I hope these comments may be helpful for you.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment.
Thanks for your time.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Review of Besoain, et all for MDPI
The work is well structured. This reviewer appreciated that each section was focused. However,
1. The authors seem to keep changing their focus on the RQ(s) they are investigating. From the abstract, the reader gets the idea that the paper is about evaluation and comparison between interactive websites vs VR in the context of museums and cultural heritage. But then the introduction relegates this RQ to a secondary role and make their adaptation of a VR system the main subject of the paper.
2. The start of the background section is poorly written. It contains several single-sentence paragraphs, and the message is unclear.
3. The demographics of the subjects in the reported experiment are vaguely characterised. There is no information beyond gender and age, making it impossible to determine whether some not randomised (hidden) factor biases the results presented.
4. The notion of "thought favourability" was not defined. It appears to be a known term in the context of this work, but since it is an essential dimension of the work, it should be briefly defined (along with all other important dimensions) in the introduction.
5. The authors should present a table of initial coder disagreement and comment on the general patterns of subject answers that coders disagreed upon to convince the reader that their resolution did not bias the data.
6. The methods section needs to be more detailed. The authors did not explain the statistical treatment of the data. Such explanation needs to include the used tests, justification for these tests, and test assumptions in the data.
7. I believe the authors can make a stronger case in their discussion section using the obtained results. The discussion section fails to consolidate the relevant information derived from the data analysis.
8. The authors did not mention anything about consents, ethical treatment of the data, anonymisation, etc.
9. The text needs editing. Several sentences do not work well in English. Paragraph planning needs to be improved as well.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment.
Thanks for your time.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors, thank you very much for your intensive and purposeful amendments. From my view the paper improved well.
You may allow two remarks:
- In line 431 you may refer to the "LoD of the 3D content" rather than "LoD of the application"?
- Although the language is correct (...at least from my PoV as non-native speaker :-) I am wondering if clarity of the article could be still improved? E.g. some sentences are very long and hard to grasp - f.i.: "Attitudes have been studied in different contexts as they are a keystone for social psychology because they are relevant to aspects of daily life such as information seeking, approaching or avoidance behavior, and expression of people’s identities, among others [23,24]" (lines 82-85). May I suggest that you consider further editing, focusing on better readability?
