Abstract
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown in early 2020, museums closed their doors and shifted online. Building on recent advancements in digital technologies, they utilized virtual reality (VR) and other technologies to engage visitors and enhance their virtual museum experiences. Nevertheless, museums' VR efforts concentrate on singleton (individual) visits, even though visiting a museum is inherently a social experience. This research illuminates the social dimensions of the virtual museum through a non-holistic approach to explore the impact of social presence on the narrative construction of artifacts in a virtual art museum named "Soul versus Souls," deployed on the Spatial.io metaverse platform. The authors utilized a quasi-experimental approach to control the variables and translate conceptual definitions into operational terms that can be measured and observed. They assessed the museum narrative based on visit style (visitors' movement patterns), visit time (duration of the visit), and visitor narration (self-reflection and non-verbal interactions). The authors employed protocol analysis, observations, and retrospective interviews to document and analyze the findings. The experimental findings suggest that smaller groups facilitate focused conversations, which enhance engagement with the artifacts, while larger groups may introduce distractions that hinder narrative construction.