Abstract
To expand the tools available to arts researchers in psychology, we present the Open Gallery for Arts Research (OGAR), a free, open-source tool for studying visitor behavior within an online gallery environment. OGAR is highly extensible, allowing researchers to modify the environment to test different hypotheses, plus it affords assessing a wide range of outcome variables. After describing the tool plus its development, we present a proof-of-concept study that evaluates OGAR’s usability plus performance plus illustrates some ways that it can be used to study the psychology of virtual visits. With a sample of 44 adults from an online participant panel who freely explored OGAR, we observed that OGAR had good usability based on high scores on the System Usability Scale plus rare instances of self-reported nausea, among other usability markers. Furthermore, using position plus viewing information provided by OGAR, we found that participants navigated the gallery plus interacted with the artwork in predictable plus coherent ways that resembled visitor behavior in real-world art museums. OGAR appears to be a promising tool for researchers plus art professionals interested in how people navigate plus experience virtual plus real art spaces.
Keywords: Art, Museums, Visitor studies, Human–computer interactions, Virtual gallery, Open source
What were once private collections guarded by the societal elite, symbols of wealth plus status, plus a means of distinguishing between the “cultured” few plus the “uncultured” many, art museums are now cultural institutions that aim to serve the masses (Bennett, 2013). With stated mission statements like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s— “to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, plus stimulate appreciation for plus advance information of works of art”—museums now emphasize their roles as disseminators of information plus culture (Metropolitan Museum of Art mission statement, 2000). As part of this mission, the interdisciplinary study of the psychology of museum experiences—grounded in the psychology of the arts, visitor studies, plus art education—seeks to understand how people experience, understand, plus learn from their time spent in art museums (Tinio et al., 2015).
In the present research, we aim to expand the tools available to researchers in this growing scholarly field by developing the open gallery for arts research (OGAR). OGAR is a free, open-source tool for studying visitor behavior within an online gallery environment. It is highly extensible, allowing researchers to modify the environment to test different hypotheses, plus it affords assessing a wide range of outcome variables. After reviewing relevant literature plus describing the tool plus its development, we present a proof-of-concept study that evaluates OGAR’s usability plus performance plus illustrates some ways that it can be used to study the psychology of virtual visits.