Evaluations on Spatial Readability in Physical and Virtual Museum Experiences

Museums are public institutions that protect, research and exhibit intangible and tangible historical/cultural heritage for the purpose of education, research, entertainment and serving the development of society. Museums that appealed to the upper class of societies in the past have turned into public spaces that can be visited by large masses over time. Today, developments through the integration of culture and information technologies have enabled museums to be moved to virtual platforms. Virtual museums are accessible environments that can be visited around the world, regardless of time and place. The aim of the research is to reveal the differentiating aspects of space perception in the process of experiencing physical museums and virtual museums with high accessibility. For this purpose, in the research, spatial legibility levels in physical and virtual museums were tried to be determined by the cognitive mapping method applied to students who experienced the Istanbul Archeology Museum. As a result of the research, the data obtained from cognitive maps reveal that visitors who experience the physical museum remember more spatial data than those who experience the virtual museum, and accordingly, the legibility level of the space is higher in the physical museum. The reason for this situation is that the viewpoint is limited to the camera angle in virtual museums and since the movement is limited in virtual museums, they do not offer the visitor the opportunity to roam freely in the space.