The impact of virtual tours on museum exhibitions after the onset of covid-19 restrictions: visitor engagement and long-term perspectives

After the outbreak of Covid-19, galleries and museums have been experimenting with new ways to engage a potential audience remotely. This study focuses on the level of engagement of virtual tours in museums looking at the representation of architectural space, representation artifacts, and ease of use as possible correlated factors. A sample group of eighty early-career experts in the field of art, architecture, or design assessed their visit to the archaeological museum of Troya Müzesi in Çanakkale, Turkey; half of the participants resided in Turkey, while the other half in Italy. This paper has addressed the following research questions with an online multi-level study: how is the online exhibition platform evaluated by its audience? Can regular employment of virtual tours engage new visitors in the long term? Is the representation of a museum, in the form of a virtual twin, an adequate surrogate that creates an immersive visiting experience?