Toward Site-Aware MR Art Exhibitions: A SLAM-Based Deployment Pipeline for Spatial Coherence and Exhibition Experience

Yawei Zhao, Yuming Zhu, Hao Li, Yuqi Liang, Ao Yu, Anca-Simona Horvath, Pan Hui

Mixed Reality (MR) is increasingly being used in exhibition settings to bring digital artworks into relation with the physical environment. However, existing MR exhibition systems are often confined to prototypes or case-specific deployments, offering limited guidance for large-scale practical implementation. To address this gap, this paper presents a practical pipeline for designing and deploying large-scale MR art exhibitions, treating spatial alignment not only as a technical mechanism but also as an experiential design decision. We first conducted a pilot study comparing marker-based and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)-based alignment methods in an MR exhibition setting. Based on the results, we developed a SLAM-based pipeline for MR exhibitions that integrates technical deployment with exhibition curation. We then evaluated the pipeline through both system overhead measures and users' experiential feedback. The results show that spatial alignment influences not only technical stability, but also overall exhibition coherence, visitors' sense of continuity and immersion, and artwork interpretation. These findings provide an empirically grounded reference for future large-scale MR art exhibition deployment.