Where Digital Meets Place: Deriving Strategies for Curating Mixed Reality Exhibitions in Public Spaces

2026-03-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of effective curatorial strategies for mixed reality (MR) exhibitions in public spaces, which often fail to meaningfully integrate digital content with physical environments to enhance audience experience. Grounded in situationalist principles, the research designed and implemented an MR art exhibition within a campus public setting, employing a mixed-methods approach that combined expert focus groups with audience user studies, behavioral observation, and experiential evaluation. The work presents the first systematic curatorial framework for MR grounded in situationalism, elucidating mechanisms for embedding MR within urban contexts and articulating core experiential design principles. It further distills transferable curatorial strategies and empirically validates the foundational role of situationalist theory in enriching public engagement with MR experiences.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Planning

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies are increasingly being used to enrich exhibitions and public spaces by blending digital content with the physical environment in real time. However, little is known about curatorial strategies for embedding MR exhibitions into public spaces or promoting audience experiences. To explore this, we designed and curated a campus-based MR art exhibition, using contextualism as the fundamental concept. We conducted an interdisciplinary expert focus group alongside exhibition viewing to identify opportunities, challenges, and design strategies from multiple perspectives. In parallel, we conducted user studies with general audiences to examine how curatorial strategies foster ex-periential qualities. Our findings reveal insights from both experts and general users along with strategies in curating MR exhibitions and highlight the foundational role of contextualism in curating MR art exhibitions in urban public spaces.

Problem

• Mixed Reality
• curatorial strategies
• public spaces
• audience experience
• contextualism

Innovation

• Mixed Reality
• Contextualism
• Curatorial Strategy
• Public Space
• Experiential Design