The ecological validity of the aesthetic experience in virtual immersive environments

Art contemplation usually occurs in museums or art galleries. However, aesthetic experience has tendentially been investigated in laboratory settings, producing findings that are not fully generalizable to real-world circumstances (Brieber et al. 2014; Specker et al. 2017; Szubielska & Imbir 2021). In this regard, virtual reality (VR) could be employed to simulate immersive and realistic experiences and investigate the aesthetic experience from a more ecological perspective. In recent years, many museums have been enabling visitors to take virtual tours of their spaces, making their collections more accessible to the public. However, the extent to which the aesthetic experience in virtual immersive environments compares to that of physical exhibitions remains to be tested. To address this issue, twenty-three art naïve participants visited both the real "Domani" photographic exhibition and its virtual counterpart (counterbalanced order), created using the Unity graphics engine and made compatible for Oculus Quest 2. In both contexts, we measured the aesthetic experience using both explicit (liking, curiosity, and emotional involvement) and implicit (fixation time) parameters. During the real tour, participants gave their evaluations through a tablet, and time spent observing each photograph was recorded by a GoPro camera positioned on the subjects' heads using suitable harnesses. During the virtual tour, participants gave their evaluations through user interfaces, and could move pseudo-naturalistically thanks to teleport navigation. The results showed that, despite slightly higher curiosity levels in the real context, there were no significant differences between the two settings in terms of liking, emotional involvement, and fixation times. Furthermore, all the explicit judgments provided in the real context correlated with those in the virtual context, as did the fixation times. We could conclude that VR could serve as a good proxy for the real one, allowing a more ecological investigation of the processes involved during the aesthetic experience. Moreover, these results have clear implications for educational purposes.