Early Immersive Prototyping Enabling Experiential Understanding
The VAARHeT project demonstrated that effective XR platform development for non-technical heritage stakeholders requires fundamentally different engagement approaches than conventional software projects, with early immersive prototyping proving essential for requirements gathering and shared vision establishment. During the initial design sprint from August through November 2024, XR Ireland created rudimentary virtual environments in Mozilla Hubs representing archaeological site contexts, visitor centre scenarios, and museum coordination spaces, inviting Āraiši Ezerpils team members Eva Koljera and Jānis Meinerts to explore these spaces and experience collaborative communication within immersive contexts before articulating specific technical requirements or feature specifications. This hands-on exposure transformed abstract possibilities about what voice-activated XR might accomplish into tangible experiential understanding, enabling heritage professionals who had never worn VR headsets, navigated 3D virtual spaces, or interacted through spatial computing interfaces to viscerally comprehend immersive technology capabilities and limitations through direct experience rather than relying on verbal descriptions, marketing demonstrations, or imagination alone to envision how technologies might serve museum operational needs. The design team deliberately selected low-fidelity prototype environments with obvious incompleteness and simplified representation rather than polished high-production-value demonstrations, recognising that realistic prototypes with visible limitations invited collaborative refinement and open-ended exploration whereas highly finished demos created false impressions that design decisions had been finalised, discouraging stakeholder feedback and suggestion contributions essential for uncovering genuine user needs rather than merely confirming designer assumptions about appropriate solutions. Weekly requirements sessions throughout October-November 2024 alternated between conventional videoconferencing for structured discussion and immersive virtual world meetings for experiential exploration, with the contrast demonstrating both the potential value of spatial collaboration and the learning curve requirements before non-technical users achieve fluent 3D environment interaction, informing realistic expectations about complexity levels the final platform could reasonably expect heritage professional users to accommodate without extensive training investment that resource-constrained institutions cannot sustain. XR Ireland team members invested substantial time in domain immersion activities including participating in Āraiši Ezerpils existing digital content and e-learning materials, reviewing archaeological site documentation and interpretive planning, observing museum daily operations during normal visitor periods, and studying European open-air museum best practices, building deep familiarity with heritage sector operational context, terminology conventions, pedagogical approaches, and institutional constraints before proposing technical solutions that might otherwise reflect technology-driven assumptions rather than grounded understanding of what heritage institutions actually need versus what technologists imagine they should want. This investment in mutual learning created shared vocabulary and understanding bridging organisational cultures, enabling productive requirements discussions where heritage professionals could articulate needs in terms technical teams understood whilst developers assessed feature value through heritage operational lenses rather than technical sophistication criteria divorced from institutional mission and visitor service objectives.
Value of Dedicated Domain-Expert Liaison Roles Bridging Organisational Cultures
The decision to engage Cordula Hansen from Technical Art Services as dedicated liaison between heritage domain expertise and technical XR development capabilities proved transformative for VAARHeT project success, demonstrating value proposition for translator roles bridging specialised sectors and technology providers. Hansen brought over a decade of experience in user experience research, digital cultural heritage technologies, heritage preservation methodologies, and museum visitor engagement, providing credibility with heritage stakeholders who might have been sceptical about technology-driven innovations proposed by XR developers without field experience in archaeological interpretation, conservation ethics, or museum operational workflows. Her expertise in simulation exercise design, evaluation methodology, and pedagogical assessment enabled translation of high-level museum goals including enhanced visitor engagement, multilingual accessibility, and seasonal offering extension into specific technical requirements including interaction flow specifications, intent classification category definitions, knowledge base content structures, validation instrument designs, and participant recruitment criteria that XR Ireland's engineering team could implement whilst ensuring alignment with heritage sector quality standards and cultural sensitivity requirements that technical specifications alone would not capture. Serving as independent consultant rather than embedded Āraiši Ezerpils staff member provided important arms-length perspective, questioning institutional assumptions about how heritage interpretation must be delivered whilst maintaining sufficient organisational understanding to ensure proposed innovations aligned with operational realities, budget constraints, and cultural norms governing museum practices. The liaison role managed expectation calibration from both directions: helping Āraiši Ezerpils understand what XR technology could realistically accomplish within VAARHeT timeline and budget constraints whilst helping XR Ireland appreciate why certain apparently simple requirements actually represented complex challenges given heritage operational contexts, preventing mutual frustration from misaligned expectations about feasibility, quality thresholds, or delivery timelines. Hansen participated in both Āraiši Ezerpils internal planning sessions discussing museum strategic priorities and XR Ireland technical scrums reviewing development progress, maintaining awareness of evolving priorities and emerging constraints on both sides, enabling proactive identification of potential misalignments before they manifested as project delays, deliverable disputes, or partnership tension that reactive conflict resolution would address less effectively than preventive communication. Her simulation exercise expertise proved particularly valuable during validation planning, designing evaluation instruments assessing both VOXReality technical integration requirements and Āraiši Ezerpils heritage education effectiveness criteria through single workshop structure, avoiding need for separate validation events that would have doubled participant time commitments, complicated result interpretation from testing different aspects in isolation, and increased overall project complexity. The consultant reflected that bridging gaps required translation in both directions: technical teams needed help understanding that heritage users prioritise scenario realism and learning outcome achievement over technical sophistication or cutting-edge feature deployment, whilst heritage teams needed reassurance that technical constraints represented genuine limitations requiring priority trade-offs rather than excuses for incomplete delivery or resistance to stakeholder requirements. Having liaison personnel relatively tech-savvy compared to typical museum staff who could grasp key Unity development environment elements, understand WebSocket synchronisation concepts, and appreciate why certain feature requests would require substantial architecture changes enabled more productive conversations about what to build first, what to defer to future iterations, and what to abandon entirely as impractical within project scope, accelerating decision-making through informed discussion rather than extended negotiation cycles attempting to reconcile fundamentally incompatible perspectives.
Iterative Feedback Cycles and Progressive Validation Refinement
The VAARHeT development process implemented tight iterative cycles with fortnightly development sprints, twice-weekly scrum sessions, and continuous prototype demonstrations enabling rapid feedback incorporation throughout implementation phases from October 2024 through June 2025. XR Ireland's engineering team adopted practices where each sprint delivered testable increments that Āraiši Ezerpils team members could actually experience rather than merely reviewing status reports or technical specifications, moving beyond documentation-based communication to hands-on interaction with evolving capabilities ensuring feedback addressed actual implementation behaviour rather than imagined functionality that written specifications might convey ambiguously. This rhythm created visible progress momentum where museum stakeholders observed tangible advancement every two weeks, maintaining confidence in project velocity and partnership value whilst enabling course corrections before substantial effort invested in directions that user testing revealed suboptimal compared to alternative approaches requiring modest architecture adjustment easily accommodated during active development versus expensive refactoring after implementation completion. The rehearsal workshop on 25 June 2025 with Āraiši Ezerpils project team members (not yet involving visitor test participants) represented critical validation checkpoint, engaging museum professionals in comprehensive end-to-end testing identifying interface confusions, workflow gaps, content inaccuracies, and technical integration bugs requiring resolution before final visitor validation sessions risking negative reception from unresolved issues that internal testing should have caught. Feedback from rehearsal directly shaped final refinement sprint during late June and early July 2025, including avatar response length reduction addressing complaint about excessively verbose answers, VR environment visual cue additions improving content discoverability after floor and doors events proved difficult to trigger without explicit prompting, translation application UI clarity improvements following feedback about button feedback insufficiency, and stability testing addressing intermittent cloud connectivity failures disrupting user sessions during periods of peak concurrent usage. The iterative structure deliberately separated rapid learning cycles during active development from summative evaluation after platform stabilisation, recognising that users provide qualitatively different feedback types when asked "how can we improve this work-in-progress?" during formative testing versus "does this finished system meet your needs?" during final validation, with both feedback modes serving essential but distinct purposes in development progression from early concept through implementation to deployment readiness. Sprint retrospectives examined not merely technical progress and feature completion but whether the user-centric design process itself worked effectively, refining how teams gathered requirements, prioritised competing demands, communicated technical constraints to non-technical stakeholders, and incorporated feedback translating user observations into actionable engineering tasks, treating methodology improvement as equally important to technical advancement and creating learning effects where later development cycles executed more efficiently than earlier phases because partnership had developed shared vocabulary, mutual constraint understanding, and streamlined communication patterns eliminating friction from mismatched assumptions.
Domain Immersion Investment and Requirement Discovery Through Observation
The most valuable requirements emerged not from formal specification discussions or structured elicitation sessions but from XR Ireland team observations of actual museum operations, visitor behaviours, and heritage professional workflows in authentic operational contexts without mediation through abstraction or documentation. Attending live guided tours at Āraiši Ezerpils during summer high season revealed physical environment constraints including outdoor acoustic challenges from wind noise interfering with guide speech audibility, visitor attention division between listening to explanations and observing architectural details or landscape features creating comprehension gaps, group size dynamics where some visitors hear guide clearly whilst others positioned at group periphery miss substantial content, and multilingual heterogeneity where international visitors attending Latvian-language tours experience complete exclusion from educational narrative without translation support. Observing craft demonstrations and living history interpretation showed specialist knowledge communication patterns emphasising gesture, tool manipulation, material handling, and spatial relationships conveying essential information inaccessible through purely linguistic explanation, validating AR translation agent requirement for maintaining visual attention on physical demonstration whilst reading subtitle text rather than focusing on smartphone screen forcing binary choice between observing action or reading translation. Participating in museum visitor experience from arrival through ticket purchase, facility orientation, outdoor site navigation, and exhibition engagement revealed friction points, information gaps, wayfinding confusions, and service interaction patterns that automated welcome avatar could theoretically address, though subsequent validation proved theoretical information delivery better served by conventional digital solutions versus immersive AR complexity. Reviewing museum existing digital content, signage systems, printed visitor guides, and website information architecture revealed institutional content management workflows, update frequency patterns, multilingual translation processes, and quality assurance practices that any new technology system would need to accommodate rather than requiring wholesale operational restructuring that museums lack resources or institutional flexibility to undertake. Discussion with museum management about budget constraints, staffing limitations, seasonal revenue patterns, and strategic priorities for visitor number growth versus visitor experience deepening versus educational mission advancement provided economic and institutional context ensuring technical proposals aligned with realistic organisational capabilities and cultural values rather than assuming infinite resources or flexibility to adopt technologies regardless of implementation burden. This comprehensive domain immersion investment consuming nearly three months of Phase 1 timeline substantially exceeded conventional requirements gathering duration, yet prevented wasted development effort on capabilities seeming valuable in abstract discussions but delivering minimal operational benefits when confronted with actual museum workflows, visitor behaviours, and institutional constraints that surface observation revealed whilst formal specification sessions might not capture through stakeholder articulation difficulties or designer question framing limitations.
Transferable Lessons for XR Development in Specialised Heritage Sectors
The VAARHeT user-centric design experience generated methodology lessons applicable to XR development across diverse specialised heritage contexts beyond archaeological museums including art museums, historic houses, industrial heritage sites, maritime heritage, and cultural landscape preservation. Invest substantially in early domain immersion before proposing technical solutions, with time spent observing actual operations, participating in existing workflows, and understanding institutional culture, constraints, and values proving essential for developing solutions fitting within rather than requiring wholesale restructuring of established practices that organisations cannot or will not undertake regardless of theoretical benefits. Prototype early with deliberately incomplete implementations inviting collaborative refinement rather than polished demonstrations suggesting design finalisation, creating psychological permission for stakeholders to request changes, express concerns, and propose alternative directions ensuring final solutions serve genuine needs rather than reflecting initial designer assumptions that subsequent validation might reveal as misaligned with actual requirements. Identify and engage domain-expert translators bridging technical possibilities and operational requirements, whether through external consultants, internal staff with cross-domain experience, or dedicated liaison roles creating continuous communication channels throughout development rather than relying on periodic formal reviews or specification documents attempting to capture requirements completely upfront before implementation commencement. Separate theoretical knowledge transfer from situated skill practice when designing training or education applications, recognising immersive technology provides limited value for conveying conceptual information best accomplished through conventional digital learning whilst offering substantial value for experiential learning requiring contextual practice with realistic dynamics that conventional media cannot adequately replicate. Budget adequate time for expectation calibration and mutual learning between technical and heritage domain teams, with weeks or months spent in collaborative exploration where both sides develop shared understanding about possibilities and constraints representing essential project infrastructure rather than overhead to minimise in service of faster implementation commencement. Validate assumptions through hands-on user testing with representative populations rather than relying on expert opinions, stakeholder assertions, or specification reviews, with actual interaction revealing usability friction, workflow misalignments, and value propositions proving different from what designers anticipated or users predicted they would want when imagining rather than experiencing functionality. Maintain flexibility about implementation approaches whilst preserving clarity about ultimate objectives, recognising how technical capabilities combine to serve heritage interpretation and visitor engagement outcomes matters far more than whether specific technologies get incorporated, enabling pragmatic substitutions when integration challenges or performance limitations make originally planned approaches impractical without compromising essential value delivery. These transferable lessons demonstrate that successful XR deployment in specialised heritage domains requires more than technical excellence, with understanding organisational culture, workflow integration requirements, change management dynamics, and user capability profiles determining whether technically sound solutions achieve adoption and deliver sustained value versus remaining unused because they failed to accommodate human and institutional realities that purely technical requirements analysis would not adequately capture.
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