As extended reality continues to grow, new possibilities arise to provide users with novel ways to experience cultural heritage (CH). In particular, applications based on virtual reality (VR), such as virtual museums, have gained increasing popularity, since they can offer new ways for preserving and presenting CH content that are not feasible in physical museums. Despite the numerous benefits, the level of immersion and presence provided by VR experiences still present challenges that could hinder the effectiveness of this technology in the CH context. In this perspective, it is crucial to provide the users with high-fidelity experiences, in which also the interaction with the objects and the characters populating virtual environments are realistic and natural. This article focuses on this challenge and specifically investigates how the combined use of tangible and speech interfaces can help improve the overall experience. To this aim, a immersive VR experience is proposed, which allows the users to manipulate virtual objects belonging to a museum collection (in the specific case, Ancient Egypt remains) by physically operating on 3D printed replicas and to talk with a curator’s avatar to get explanations by using their voice. A user study was conducted to evaluate the impact of the considered interfaces on immersion, presence, user experience, usability, and intention to visit, comparing the richest configuration against simpler setups obtained by either removing the tangible interface, the speech interface, or both (and using only handheld controllers). The results show that the combined use of the two interfaces can effectively contribute at making the CH experience in VR more engaging.

随着扩展现实的不断发展，为用户提供体验文化遗产 (CH) 的新方式的新可能性出现了。特别是，基于虚拟现实（VR）的应用程序（例如虚拟博物馆）越来越受欢迎，因为它们可以提供在实体博物馆中不可行的保存和展示CH内容的新方式。尽管有很多好处，但 VR 体验提供的沉浸感和临场感仍然存在挑战，可能会阻碍该技术在 CH 环境中的有效性。从这个角度来看，为用户提供高保真体验至关重要，其中与虚拟环境中的对象和角色的交互是真实和自然的。本文重点关注这一挑战，并专门研究了有形界面和语音界面的结合使用如何帮助改善整体体验。为此，提出了一种身临其境的 VR 体验，它允许用户通过在 3D 打印复制品上进行物理操作来操纵属于博物馆收藏的虚拟对象（在具体情况下是古埃及遗迹），并与馆长的化身交谈以获取信息。用他们的声音进行解释。进行了一项用户研究，以评估所考虑的界面对沉浸感、存在感、用户体验、可用性和访问意图的影响，将最丰富的配置与通过删除有形界面、语音界面或两者所获得的更简单的设置进行比较（并且仅使用手持控制器）。结果表明，两个界面的结合使用可以有效地使 VR 中的 CH 体验更具吸引力。