The role of artwork complexity in understanding visitor behavior in immersive virtual galleries

The study explores visitor experiences in an immersive virtual gallery, focusing on the complexity of artworks displayed. The Virtual Gallery Environment (VGE) software provides a method to empirically analyze visitor engagement and movement through real-time tracking of viewing time, distance traveled, circulation paths, and heatmaps within a fully immersive virtual gallery. In this experiment, 136 participants used a head-mounted display to explore a virtual exhibition that featured primarily simple or complex abstract artworks, each with one salient artwork of the opposite complexity. Results from a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) showed that complex artworks attract longer viewing times. This effect is amplified when a salient complex artwork is placed among predominantly simple artworks. Visitors tend to view complex artworks for a longer period of time when adopting exploratory movement flows, such as zig-zag movement. Conversely, viewing time decreased when visitors followed a central movement approach, resulting in shorter viewing times for both simple and complex artworks. Moreover, total distance traveled interacts with the visual complexity of artworks to influence viewing time. Simpler artworks are usually viewed only once, suggesting they do not capture prolonged initial attention as effectively as more complex artworks. The results indicate that the position of an artwork in a virtual gallery impacts viewing time, influenced by the exhibition's overall visual complexity. The visualizations of the visitor behavior revealed nuanced engagement patterns, providing insights into the effects of visual complexity.