![]() Increasing emphasis is being placed on identifying who the audience is, how they interact with individual objects or entire galleries, what information they take home with them, and what meaning they assign to their experiences (Brieber et al., 2015 Leder et al., 2012 Smith, 2014). This has led to recent efforts to recast museums as more “user friendly” and to engage visitors in a more participatory way (Choi, 2013). Further, they must be able to present those objects in a way that is meaningful to those groups. To keep up with patrons, museums need to house objects that are important not just to individuals but to groups of people. OGAR appears to be a promising tool for researchers and art professionals interested in how people navigate and experience virtual and real art spaces. Furthermore, using position and viewing data provided by OGAR, we found that participants navigated the gallery and interacted with the artwork in predictable and coherent ways that resembled visitor behavior in real-world art museums. With a sample of 44 adults from an online participant panel who freely explored OGAR, we observed that OGAR had good usability based on high scores on the System Usability Scale and rare instances of self-reported nausea, among other usability markers. After describing the tool and its development, we present a proof-of-concept study that evaluates OGAR’s usability and performance and illustrates some ways that it can be used to study the psychology of virtual visits. OGAR is highly extensible, allowing researchers to modify the environment to test different hypotheses, and it affords assessing a wide range of outcome variables. To expand the tools available to arts researchers in psychology, we present the Open Gallery for Arts Research (OGAR), a free, open-source tool for studying visitor behavior within an online gallery environment.
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