# An Evaluation of the Effects of a Virtual Museum on Users' Attitudes towards Cultural Heritage
## 5 Discussion
### Limitations and Future Work  
Some limitations of the present work are as follows:  
* The time that participants dedicated to each condition of the test (virtual museum and interactive website): as the simulator and the website were hosted on different servers, we were not able to measure time of observation, which is associated with more capacity to analyze the information as people invest more time [21]. It might be the case that a certain multimedia experience is related to the investment of more time, affecting the results. * Other demographic variables: we did not include other demographic variables besides gender and age because we do not have any hypothesis regarding alternative variables to understand potential differences between the types of systems and attitudes. Since participants were randomly assigned, the potential bias from those demographics is constant across conditions. Nevertheless, we analyzed if there were any differences in the percentage of men and women or age between conditions. A chi-square analysis showed no significant differences between gender (\(X^{2}(2)=4.18\); \(p=0.12\)) and age (t(96) = 0.95; \(p=0.34\)), suggesting that potential differences in sample distribution are not responsible for our results. Some aspects of future work include the following:  
* Controlling the time investment and including a new and more immersive multimedia experience: this could be applied using the VR version of the virtual museum with Oculus devices (i.e., HMD). More importantly, the results of this study allow for a discussion about the potential reasons that underlie the shown effects. For example, ifthe multimedia experience does not lead to more presence, what is the role of those types of experiences? Some research showed that the effect of different devices or experiences on attitudes are based on immersion (an objective measure of a virtual device) rather than presence [32]. Then, how can presence be enhanced? Research on transportation [47] showed that a feeling of \"being there\" is enhanced when a story precedes the experience, inviting the user to imagine the place. In our case, both experiences have the same story, which might be the reason for the absence of differences. * Exploring different objects and simulated situations to replicate the pattern of results of the present study: this includes several factors such as integrating presence and thought favorability, along with other variables such as changes in the level of detail (LoD) of the software. Traditionally, an increase in LoD tends to enhance attitudes by itself. However, based on our results, LoD might lead to positive or negative attitudes depending on the variable that it interacts with. Moreover, it might be the case that LoD has no influence at all when the story behind the software is interesting and engaging [47]. Thus, a software with a very low LoD might lead to positive attitudes if it is based on a good story (i.e., lead to favorable thoughts), in a similar vein that reading a good book (a very low LoD) leads to satisfaction when it is finished. This pattern of predictions is observed in Figure 4, right panel (pag. 8). However, depending on the attitudinal object, the previous pattern might change on interacting with presence and thought favorability (as in attitudes toward face-to-face visits). Finally, it could be interesting to analyze changes in other attitudinal objects related to heritage when individuals explore a simulated or a web-based museum. For example, attitudes toward local entrepreneurship, hand-crafting, or rural tourism could change if they are psychologically linked to the primary object, leading to an indirect change in attitudes (e.g., [48]). * Continuing research on attitude change: Figure 4 shows that, regarding general attitudes, positive and negative thoughts lead to similar results on attitudes as presence increases but to main effects when there is low presence.