From Visit to Reflection: A Narrative Interaction Design Approach for Continuity in Virtual Museum Experiences with LLMs

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Virtual museums have become an important form of cultural experience, yet narrative support often remains limited to individual exhibits or isolated phases of a visit. We define this as a problem of narrative continuity and address it through narrative interaction design. A multi-stakeholder formative study identified three design considerations: spatial structuring, relational interpretation, and reflective feedback. We instantiated these in NarraTour, a virtual museum prototype using bounded large language model-supported functions grounded in curated museum data and recorded interaction traces. A within-subject study (N = 24) across four configurations showed that spatial support establishes narrative progression, relational support is most effective when aligned with visitors’ progression, and reflective support extends continuity beyond exploration by enabling retrospective sense-making. We contribute a narrative interaction design approach for sustaining continuity across virtual museum experiences and empirical insights into when and how different forms of narrative support should be introduced.