Comparing Flow, Narrative, and Spatial Immersion in an HMD-AR Serious Game for Museum Learning

A field study of 144 museum visitors examined whether three design emphases in a head-mounted augmented reality (HMD-AR) coral-reef serious game, namely flow-enhanced, narrative-enhanced, and spatial-enhanced variants, would map onto the immersion types they were built to foster, and how those immersion types relate to appreciation and engagement. The authors frame immersion as a design variable to be aligned with interpretive goals rather than maximized generically. The work uses a Research-through-Design approach, adapted standardized scales for flow, narrative, and spatial immersion, study-specific outcome items, and analysis through ANOVAs and regression, all conducted in a natural history museum setting.

The clearest expected result was that the flow-enhanced variant produced higher flow scores than the spatial variant (p = .044). Spatial immersion, however, was unexpectedly lowest in the spatial-enhanced variant, indicating that the design emphasis did not translate into the intended perception. Narrative immersion was the only immersion type that significantly predicted perceived meaning and educational value (β = 0.221, p = .034, R² = .039), a modest effect. Engagement intentions were largely accounted for by prior engagement rather than by any immersion type. The authors note that the immersion types were not fully isolated from one another, which limits the strength of causal attributions.

Taken together, the findings suggest that narrative immersion is the most relevant lever for meaning-making in museum AR experiences, while flow and spatial emphases did not reliably produce their intended effects. The study's scope is a single museum, a single coral-reef content domain, and a between-subjects design, so its conclusions speak most directly to comparable HMD-AR interpretive installations rather than to AR or serious games broadly.