Southall, Helen2025-03-182025-03-182025Southall, H. (2025, March 8-12). Usability testing of VR reconstructions for museums and heritage sites: A case study from 14th century Chester (UK). 2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), 8-12 March 2025, St. Malo, France.http://hdl.handle.net/10034/629310This paper reports research on the usability of a 3D Virtual Reality (VR) model of the interior of St. John’s Church, Chester, as it probably appeared in the 14th Century. A VR visualization was created in Unity, based on archive data and historical records. This was adapted for use with Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets. Participants took part in usability tests of the experience, providing both qualitative and quantitative usability data. Although created with modest time and financial resources, the experience received a good overall usability rating, and numerous positive comments, including from novice VR users. Negative comments mainly related to the experience of wearing a VR headset. This paper concludes by suggesting further work, with thoughts on highly immersive VR in heritage contexts, especially combined with recent developments in generative artificial intelligence.Usabilityvirtual realitydigital heritagemuseum collectionsConference ContributionAs I only attended the ARCHERIX workshop, and did not pay the full conference fee, the paper will not be appearing in the proceedings of the full conference published by the IEEE. The workshop organisers are therefore arranging for all papers presented (including mine) to be published with an open access publisher. These publication details are not available yet, and are unlikely to be available within 10 weeks of the paper being accepted.2025-03-18