Augmented Experiences: What Can Mobile Augmented Reality Offer Museums and Historic Sites?
Date
2015-09-11
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Abstract
Contemporary museums are active places of edutainment where storytelling is as valuable as artefacts. Museums strive to create exciting and memorable experiences for visitors, including technophiles. This helps maintaining and attracting visitors, and therefore, financially sustains these cultural institutions. To achieve their goals, museums are increasingly exploring and adopting information and communication technologies to enhance visiting experience. Most recently, mobile augmented reality (AR) technology has found its way into museums and historic sites premises. As a medium for enriching human senses and mixing real and virtual worlds, mobile AR offers state-of-art opportunities to spatially and conceptually orient visitors. However, the growing number of museum mobile AR projects outweighs their systematic evaluations. Since designing and developing mobile AR projects consumes considerable time and resources, empirical investigation of such projects is a necessity. Although the literature recognizes this necessity, there is still a lack of systematic evaluation studies. Furthermore, among the few studies, most lack the validity that comes with employing true experiments with control and randomization. As a result, the literature lacks empirical evidence to guide future projects in the field.
This research empirically investigates the application of mobile AR for enhancing visits to museums and historic sites. It focuses on the effectiveness of mobile AR for enhancing navigation and increasing informal learning and enjoyment in outdoor museums. I conducted the research investigations in two studies. For each study, I designed, co-developed, and evaluated a mobile AR prototype for use in Heritage Park, an outdoor living history museum in Calgary, Canada. The summative evaluation of each study, empirically and rigorously evaluated the objectives of the prototypes in a true experiment. Results from the experiments show that mobile AR experiences can effectively enhance museums and historic sites visiting experience by making outdoor navigation more informed and efficient as well as increasing some categories of informal learning, enjoyment, and interest. The results also show that the positive impacts of a mobile AR experience can increase intensification and gift purchases in museum gift shops. Such impact might contribute to these cultural institutions financially, and offset the costs of developing the mobile AR content.
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Keywords
Architecture, Museology
Citation
Mohammed-Amin, R. K. (2015). Augmented Experiences: What Can Mobile Augmented Reality Offer Museums and Historic Sites? (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25067