Open Gallery for Arts Research (OGAR): An Open-Source Tool for Studying the Psychology of Virtual Art Museum Visits

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, and it affords assessing a wide range of outcome variables. After describing the tool and its development, we present a proof-of-concept study that evaluates OGAR’s usability and performance and 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 and rare instances of self-reported nausea, among other usability markers. Furthermore, using position and viewing data provided by OGAR, we found that participants navigated the gallery and interacted with the artwork in predictable and coherent ways that resembled visitor behavior in real-world art museums. OGAR appears to be a useful tool for researchers and art professionals interested in how people navigate and experience virtual and real art spaces.

Visiting Virtual Museums: How Personality and Art-Related Individual Differences Shape Visitor Behavior in an Online Virtual Gallery

“…OGAR collects and allows the designer to access a robust set of time-stamped variables about the user, such as their movement and gaze, and it has been evaluated as an acceptable alternative to in-person research in terms of navigation and artwork viewing behavior. In a proof-of-concept study using a small sample of 44 adults, Rodriguez-Boerwinkle et al (2022) demonstrated some basic indicators of OGAR's validity: as the gallery size increased, visitors spent longer in the gallery and traveled further within it. The participants actively approached and viewed the available artworks, and they were able to successfully navigate the space without major usability concerns.…”

“…For this reason, the current study will use the Open Gallery for Arts Research (OGAR; Rodriguez-Boerwinkle et al, 2022), an online virtual gallery tool for studying the psychology of the virtual art museum visit. The opensource gallery software allows researchers to design a non-immersive 3D environment and embed it in a webpage or online survey software where it can then be accessed by participants recruited through online survey pools or by lab-based PERSONALITY & VIRTUAL ART VIEWING 8 participants with lab hardware.…”

“…First, it serves as an advanced proof-of-concept of the usability and validity of OGAR, a new tool for studying virtual visitors. As the first study of its kind, Rodriguez-Boerwinkle et al (2022) served as a valuable early exploration into the use of non-immersive 3D virtual galleries for psychology of arts research, but there is still much to learn about this new tool. For example, OGAR's inaugural study was conducted using only a small sample and was likely underpowered to detect some effects.…”

“…For example, OGAR's inaugural study was conducted using only a small sample and was likely underpowered to detect some effects. The one-and two-room layouts used by Rodriguez-Boerwinkle et al (2022) also constrained participants to relatively predictable, linear paths. In the present study, we examined unconstrained movement and view behavior in a three-room, interconnected gallery space with more artworks and a much larger participant sample than what was used in Rodriguez-Boerwinkle et al (2022).…”

The influence of visitor-based social contextual information on visitors’ museum experience

“…Such studies have aimed to provide researchers or museum experts details about the relationship between visitors’ behavior when viewing exhibitions and artworks and their satisfaction [ 18 ]. For example, Lanir et al [ 19 ] proposed a system that provides museum experts with visualized visitor behavior information, and Rodriguez-Boerwinkle, Boerwinkle, and Silvia [ 20 ] developed the method for art research by tracking visitors in a virtual museum environment. Even though visitor behavior and reaction data have been collected, these collected data have been used as information sources for researchers or museum operators only and have not been provided to museum visitors.…”