# A Metaverse Platform for Preserving and Promoting Intangible Cultural Heritage
## 3 Results and Discussion  
Usability and engagement tests were performed on the developed metaverse application in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the platform. Usability refers to the ease and satisfaction with which users interact with the interface of a website or application. A more usable interface has various benefits, including improved information accessibility and comprehension, simplified content memorization and learning, and more user autonomy and security when using the product. On the other hand, user engagement refers to the level of a user's cognitive, temporal, and behavioral involvement when interacting with a digital system. Given the historical meaning of this event and the expectation of a wide and heterogeneous audience, these evaluations were carefully developed to determine how people from various backgrounds and demographics would engage with and navigate the application. A heterogeneous group of thirty participants, representing a wide range of backgrounds and demographics, spanning ages 21-63 and different education levels, was actively involved in the testing process. The intentional inclusion of this diversity provided a thorough evaluation across a wide range of potential users who will participate in the metaverse experience during the celebrations. The participants were further separated into two evenly distributed groups: headset users, who tested the experience with the Meta Quest Pro VR headset, and smartphone users, who tested the experience using a smartphone. The participants from both groups underwent a preliminary training phase to become familiar with the commands used for navigation and interaction within the virtual environment. The distinction allowed us to evaluate if the experience could be perceived differently when using devices with different levels of immersion and different interaction modalities. To analyze the application's usability, the System Usability Scale (SUS) was utilized, which is a standardized test consisting of ten questions designed to investigate a platform's ease of use. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is the most commonly used standardized survey for evaluating perceived usability. It has been extensively adopted in several different domains since its inception in the 1980s to the present day, proving to be a solid measure of perceived usability [32]. Each questionnaire item can be answered with five response options, ranging from one, \"Strongly agree\", to five, \"Strongly disagree\". The participants' scores for each question were then converted into a new number that could vary from 0 to 100, as described by [PERSON] et al. in [33]. According to studies, an SUS score of 68 or higher is regarded as above average, while anything less than 68 is considered below average [34]. To assess user engagement, the User Engagement Scale (UES) questionnaire in its short form was administered to participants. The User Engagement Scale (UES) has been  
Figure 4: Metaverse platform on Spatial. View of the VR environment in the contemporary scene with the access portal in the background. considered one of the most used approaches to assess user engagement (UE) in a variety of digital domains [35]. The same research highlighted the need for a briefer questionnaire, which led to the User Engagement Scale-Short Form (UES-SF) to avoid some issues arising when comparing UES answers across different applications. Consequently, we decided to adopt the UES-SF to meet a balanced trade-off between the accuracy and the robustness of the results in order to facilitate comparisons with future applications in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, in this case, participants had to rate their degree of agreement or disagreement on a five-point scale with each of the twelve items in the questionnaire. The total engagement score, ranging from one to five, was then determined by aggregating all the elements and dividing by twelve, as described in [35].