Balancing Attention in an Immersive Augmented Reality Multiplayer Game for Museum Education

A study of 90 museum visitors who played a two-person augmented reality (AR) game at a natural history museum examines how players divide their attention among a real dinosaur fossil, virtual overlays, and their co-player. The game, built for Meta Quest 3 headsets, asks pairs to choose colours and patterns for a virtual Parasaurolophus by stepping through animal-themed portals, with the fossil serving as the physical anchor for the experience. The authors combined observation, pre- and post-game questionnaires, post-game attention-triangle mapping, and interviews, with interview data coded through an inter-rater content analysis.

The central finding is that participants focused mainly on the virtual elements, a pattern the authors attribute largely to novelty, since most had little prior AR or VR experience. The fossil received comparatively little sustained visual attention, and co-player attention varied with the game's active and passive phases. Despite this, the game produced statistically significant gains in interest in the Parasaurolophus (medium effect, d = .54), in dinosaurs generally, in scientific hypothesis-making, and in the intention to inspect the fossil more closely and seek further information afterward (medium effect, d = .41). Attention patterns did not vary meaningfully by age, gender, prior AR experience, or relationship to the co-player.

The authors frame the fossil as a contextual anchor rather than a constant visual target, arguing that meaningful learning engagement in heritage AR does not require continuous gaze at the authentic artifact. Limitations noted include passthrough clarity issues on the headset, occasional difficulty distinguishing real from virtual content, and the likelihood that novelty effects will diminish as users become accustomed to the medium.