Galaw at Gunita: Extended Reality Murals for Experiencing Filipino Art

AI summary

Overview

Research area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), specifically extended reality (XR), cultural computing, and museum/exhibition interaction design. The paper is filed under arXiv cs.HC with CCS categories "Human-centered Computing — Mixed / Augmented Reality" and "Applied Computing — Interactive Learning Environments."

Technical level: Intermediate. The paper is primarily a system design, implementation, and user-study report rather than an algorithmic or theoretical contribution, but it assumes familiarity with XR interaction concepts, the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ-S), and interaction-log analysis.

Scope (one sentence): The paper presents SoulWall, an extended reality interactive mural that augments Filipino artworks with gaze- and touch-triggered animations and information modals, and reports a 16-participant user study combining UEQ-S questionnaire results with automatically logged interaction data.

Publication venue: Proceedings of the 26th Philippine Computing Science Congress (PCSC 2026), April 23–25, 2026, Davao, Philippines. Posted to arXiv as 2603.08557v1 [cs.HC] on 09 Mar 2026, under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. All authors are affiliated with De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines, and the paper notes that all authors contributed equally.

What This Paper Is About

Public exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries combine artworks, explanatory text, spatial layouts, and ambient stimuli, which the paper argues can cause cognitive fatigue when presented simultaneously. In the Philippine context, access to visual art is also limited by physical preservation concerns, exhibition constraints, and geographic availability — artworks carry precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial significance that makes damage or inaccessibility costly.

The goal is to build and evaluate a system that does not replace physical artworks but instead creates an "interactive digital twin" of them. SoulWall lets viewers look at, touch, zoom into, and animate Filipino paintings at scale while the original printed mural remains unaltered. The system is named after the Filipino verbs galaw (to touch/move) and gunita (to reminisce).

Key Contributions

1. A working XR mural system (SoulWall) that augments a physically printed large-format mural with digital animations and information modals, using the Philippine eagle as an abstract symbolic visual anchor split into four segments: A) left wing, B) center body, C) center-right wing, and D) right wing.

2. A set of eight lightweight, trigger-based interactions designed for walk-up use: gaze-based highlighting, modal activation, modal dismissal, modal repositioning (drag within a bounded area), pinch-to-zoom, a reset function, help access (replays a short tutorial), and scene switching (a museum icon transitions to an overview of the exhibition layout).

3. An interaction-logging infrastructure that automatically captures movement trajectories, time spent near mural segments, selection and modal-activation events, and dwell patterns during exploration.

4. An evaluation of user experience and spatial engagement patterns, combining UEQ-S scores with logged interaction data across 16 participants, yielding design implications for XR murals around visual salience, spatial legibility, interaction simplicity, and onboarding.

Main Findings

• Pragmatic quality was rated positively: UEQ-S pragmatic quality mean M = 4.66 (SD = 0.61), indicating participants generally found the system understandable and manageable during short-term use.

• Hedonic quality was rated higher: UEQ-S hedonic quality mean M = 6.02 (SD = 0.71), suggesting the interactive mural was perceived as engaging and enjoyable.

• Overall user experience was positive: Overall UEQ-S score M = 5.34 (SD = 0.54). The paper notes the graph was scaled to half values because the short version of the UEQ was used, and score transmutations were made with the official analysis tool by Schrepp et al. (2017).

• Movement activity concentrated on specific artworks: Highest movement was recorded for artwork C_5 (M = 15.63 movements, SD = 35.14), followed by B_1 (M = 15.31, SD = 47.82) and A_3 (M = 15.19, SD = 39.36).

• Interaction duration followed a different pattern than movement: Artwork A_5 received the longest interaction times on average (M = 229.57 ms, SD = 454.74 ms), followed by C_1 (M = 203.90 ms, SD = 401.54 ms) and B_1 (M = 195.50 ms, SD = 387.81 ms).

• Novel distinction between movement-driven and duration-driven engagement: High movement activity and long interaction duration did not always occur on the same artworks, suggesting visual salience can prompt either exploratory movement or sustained inspection rather than a single dominant interaction pattern.

• Participants explored broadly rather than staying in one place: Visualizations of the logs showed participants explored multiple mural sections, with clustering around visually dense or animated regions, indicating animations and visual cues drew attention and encouraged movement.

• Individual exploration styles varied substantially: Participant P16 exhibited the highest overall movement activity across artworks, while participant P15 accumulated the greatest total interaction duration — reflecting distinct strategies ranging from broad scanning to focused inspection of individual pieces and modals.

• Intended thematic segmentation was not always reflected in behavior: Participants appeared to rely more heavily on visually salient cues than on the mural's designed segment boundaries, a challenge the paper links to XR environments where spatial metaphors are present but not sufficiently reinforced through visual or interaction cues.

• Onboarding was a weak point: Interaction logs and observations indicated some features were underutilized when participants skipped or quickly dismissed the tutorial, reflecting a common challenge in walk-up-and-use XR installations.

Methodology in Plain English

The researchers built a physical mural printed at large scale, whose composition is organized around an abstract Philippine eagle divided into four body-part segments. Each segment holds a curated set of artworks by a featured Filipino artist, and the segments are arranged to depict historical eras from oldest (leftmost) to most recent (rightmost). Over this printed mural, they layered an XR experience run on a standalone XR headset, so that looking at a segment highlights it and triggers subtle animations, and selecting a highlighted figure opens a modal with context about the artwork and artist. Viewers can drag modals, pinch to zoom, reset the scene, replay a help tutorial, or switch to an exhibition-layout overview.

To evaluate it, they recruited sixteen participants aged 18–25 through convenience sampling, all of whom gave informed consent. The setup was an indoor exhibition-like space where the mural was physically installed; a facilitator handled setup and technical issues but did not guide participant behavior, and the participant's view was mirrored to a laptop for observation and to confirm correct system operation.

Participants received a brief introduction to the system and its interactions, then were asked to freely explore the mural for approximately 15 minutes. No tasks or performance goals were imposed, so interaction would be natural and self-directed. Afterwards, participants completed the short version of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ-S). Throughout the session the system automatically logged movement, interaction events, and dwell patterns, and basic background information on prior XR experience and handedness was recorded for descriptive purposes.

Why This Matters

Impact on research. The paper positions XR as a complementary medium for art appreciation rather than a substitute for physical artworks, contrasting with XR museum systems that prioritize informational delivery or learning outcomes. Its distinctive methodological move is the combination of a standardized questionnaire (UEQ-S) with automatically logged movement and dwell data, which surfaced a finding that a single questionnaire could not: that frequent movement and long inspection time are separate engagement modes that land on different artworks. The paper also contributes a documented case of applying spatial-organization ideas (mimetic cues, landmarks, spatial segmentation, method-of-loci-inspired structure) to exploration and orientation rather than to memory optimization.

Real-world applications:

• Museums and galleries: Deploying interactive murals as walk-up installations that add animation and contextual information without modifying or risking the physical originals.
• Cultural heritage preservation: Creating interactive digital twins of fragile or geographically inaccessible artworks so audiences can engage with them while the originals stay protected.
• Artist promotion and public exhibition spaces: Showcasing Filipino artists — the paper credits Joeff Jamalul, Janina Sanico, Antonio Cuerdo, and Mike Jacinto for consenting to use their artworks — through large-format public displays.
• Public and educational cultural programming: Using lightweight, low-instruction interaction to support informal, self-paced engagement in exhibition-like environments.

Industry relevance. For XR hardware and experience developers, the paper offers concrete design guidance on walk-up-and-use installations: keep interactions familiar and optional, integrate onboarding into the interaction flow rather than relying on a tutorial users will skip, and reinforce spatial segmentation through visual framing, spacing, or background variation. For cultural institutions and exhibit designers, it illustrates a low-friction model in which attention stays on the artwork rather than on the interface.

Future Directions

1. Longer-term and in-situ deployment: Testing SoulWall in museums or public cultural spaces over extended periods, rather than in the controlled, short-term, exhibition-like setting used here.

2. More diverse audiences: The present study used a relatively homogeneous participant group aged 18–25 recruited by convenience sampling; broader participant pools are needed to generalize the findings.

3. Deeper forms of reflection and understanding: The authors state they plan to explore whether interactive XR murals can support spatial memory and recall, which they explicitly place beyond the scope of the current paper.

4. Better onboarding for walk-up XR: The finding that features were underutilized when the tutorial was skipped or quickly dismissed points toward integrating guidance directly into the interaction flow through progressive cues or contextual highlights, an open design question the paper raises but does not resolve.

Target Audience

This paper is most useful to HCI researchers working on extended reality, cultural computing, and museum or exhibition interaction; interaction and experience designers building public-facing XR installations; and museum, gallery, and cultural-heritage professionals considering digital augmentation of physical collections. It is also relevant to researchers interested in mixed-method evaluation that pairs standardized questionnaires with instrumented interaction logs. Because the system is described at the level of features, layout, and interaction flow rather than deep technical implementation, the paper is accessible to readers without specialized XR programming expertise, though the discussion of UEQ-S benchmarking and interaction-log analysis assumes some familiarity with HCI evaluation methods.

Authors’ abstract

Digital and interactive spaces are becoming increasingly prevalent as platforms for cultural engagement, offering new ways to make art more accessible, engaging, and inclusive. In the Philippine context, where visual art is deeply rooted in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories, there is a growing need to explore how digital systems can support art appreciation without replacing or compromising traditional and physical artworks. Rather than treating digital experiences as substitutes, we argue for the value of creating interactive digital twins that allow audiences to explore, touch, and engage with artworks while preserving the integrity of the originals. In this paper, we present SoulWall, an extended reality (XR) interactive mural system designed to augment Filipino artworks through embodied interaction. SoulWall enables viewers to experience paintings and animations at scale, supporting exploratory and playful engagement while respecting artist intent. We describe the design and implementation of the system, including its mural layout, interaction techniques, and interaction logging infrastructure. We report findings from a user study focused on user experience complemented by analyses of interaction logs and spatial engagement patterns. Our results highlight the potential of XR murals as a cultural computing artifact for art appreciation and for showcasing Filipino artists in interactive public and exhibition spaces.