Exploring User Engagement in Museum Scenario with EEG—A Case Study in MAV Craftsmanship Museum in Valle d’Aosta Region, Italy

In the last decade, museums and exhibitions have benefited from the advances in Virtual Reality technologies to create complementary virtual elements to the traditional visit. The aim is to make the collections more engaging, interactive, comprehensible and accessible. Also, the studies regarding users’ and visitors’ engagement suggest that the real affective state cannot be fully assessed with self-assessment techniques and that other physiological techniques, such as EEG, should be adopted to gain a more unbiased and mature understanding of their feelings. With the aim of contributing to bridging this knowledge gap, this work proposes to adopt literature EEG-based indicators (valence, arousal, engagement) to analyze the affective state of 95 visitors interacting physically or virtually (in a VR environment) with five handicraft objects belonging to the permanent collection of the Museo dell’Artigianato Valdostano di Tradizione, which is a traditional craftsmanship museum in the Valle d’Aosta region. Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) was adopted to classify the obtained engagement measures, which were labeled according to questionnaire replies. EEG analysis played a fundamental role in understanding the cognitive and emotional processes underlying immersive experiences, highlighting the potential of VR technologies in enhancing participants’ cognitive engagement. The results indicate that EEG-based indicators have common trends with self-assessment, suggesting that their use as ‘the ground truth of emotion’ is a viable option.