More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums

Abstract Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly adopted in cultural heritage to enable interactive exploration of artefacts that cannot be physically handled in museum settings. Despite growing interest in advanced interaction technologies such as haptic gloves and VR treadmills, empirical evidence on their combined effects on key user-experience metrics remains limited. This study investigates the individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and treadmill-based locomotion in immersive VR, addressing presence, usability, cognitive workload, and cybersickness. A within-subjects user study with 162 participants was conducted using a Unity-based VR application recreating a virtual jewelry museum. Four experimental conditions combined two interaction modalities (controllers vs. haptic gloves) with two locomotion techniques (controller vs. treadmill), all using an immersive HMD (HTC Vive Pro 2). Outcomes were measured via the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ), System Usability Scale (SUS), Instantaneous Self-Assessment (ISA), and Fast Motion Sickness (FMS) scales, and analyzed through linear mixed-effects models with the controller-only configuration as baseline. Results show that haptic gloves significantly decreased usability (β = −3.59, p < .05) and increased cognitive workload (β = 0.23, p < .05). Treadmill locomotion significantly reduced cognitive workload (β = −0.36, p < .05) but did not affect presence, usability, or cybersickness independently. A significant interaction emerged only for presence (β = −0.17, p < .05), indicating that combining gloves and treadmill yielded lower perceived presence than other configurations. Notably, cybersickness was not significantly affected by either the main effect of Interaction or Locomotion, nor by their combination. These findings suggest that advanced interaction technologies do not necessarily enhance immersion in VR museum experiences, and that cultural heritage applications should prioritize usable and cognitively efficient solutions, carefully weighing the benefits of haptic devices against their impact on usability and user comfort.