Designing Mixed Reality Experiences that Provide Views to the Past: Reviving the Operation of an Industrial Olive Oil Factory

Mixed reality (MR) installations in museums can be a promising communication medium for intangible aspects of cultural heritage, such as practices, rituals, craftsmanship, and customs of a previous era. There are various technological approaches for such hybrid setups exploiting the reality-virtuality continuum and posing several challenges when integrated into a museum setting. In this paper, we focus on an MR setup for communicating intangible cultural heritage through a rotating screen installed on a fixed basis that works as a "window to the past". The installation aims to augment the interior of the Museum of Industrial Olive-Oil Production of Lesvos by placing digital workers to perform actions inside the virtual reconstructed scenery and machinery. The design and development process of this installation included several stages such as: 3D scanning and modeling of the interior of the factory (including machinery), modeling and animations of the virtual characters (workers), detailed product design of the installation (including microcontroller and sensors for capturing screen rotations and design of the 3D printed parts), software development, crafting and integration. We evaluated the application s prototype in its real context in terms of overall user experience, and we report on key findings that might be helpful for other interaction designers working on similar digital heritage approaches.