Assess visitors’ experiential presence

Measure how strong visitors’ sense of experiential presence is during interactions with the Talk to TR embodied conversational exhibit, using a dedicated visitor study with established presence instruments.

Background

Talk to TR combines a full-scale digital human with an LED wall, spatial audio, lighting, staging, and real-time conversation. The authors argue that the success of the exhibit depends on the integrated physical-digital experience rather than on response quality alone.

The deployment observations suggest that avatar realism and environmental design affect immersion, but observational logging cannot determine the strength of visitors’ experienced presence. The authors therefore leave this question unresolved and specify a dedicated visitor study using established presence measures as the needed next step.

References

Whether grounding keeps synthesis faithful to the record, how often the figure lapses into anachronism, and how strong the visitor's sense of experiential presence is are questions a live exhibit raises but cannot answer on its own: the first two would require systematic annotation of responses against their sources, and the last a dedicated visitor study with established presence instruments.

— The Living Library: Transforming Archival Collections into Conversational Knowledge Systems -- Lessons from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library  (2609.09368 - Wang et al., 8 Sep 2026) in Section 10, “Limitations and Future Work,” paragraph “Open questions we do not claim to settle”