Introducing Digitized Cultural Heritage to Wider Audiences by Employing Virtual and Augmented Reality Experiences: The Case of the v-Corfu Project

In recent years, cultural projects utilizing digital applications and immersive technologies (VR, AR, MR) have grown significantly, enhancing cultural heritage experiences. Research emphasizes the importance of usability, user experience, and accessibility, yet holistic approaches remain underexplored and many projects fail to reach their audience. This article aims to bridge this gap by presenting a complete workflow including systematic requirements analysis, design guidelines, and development solutions based on knowledge extracted from previous relevant projects. The article focuses on virtual museums covering key challenges including compatibility, accessibility, usability, navigation, interaction, computational performance and graphics quality, and provides a design schema for integrating virtual museums into such projects. Following this approach, a number of applications are presented. Their performance with respect to the aforementioned key challenges is evaluated. Users are invited to assess them, providing positive results. To assess the virtual museum’s ability to attract a broader audience beyond the usual target group, a group of underserved minorities are also invited to use and evaluate it, generating encouraging outcomes. Concluding, results show that the presented workflow succeeds in yielding high-quality applications for cultural heritage communication and attraction of wider audiences, and outlines directions for further improvements in digitized heritage applications.