The territory is the map: augmented discovery in a digital cultural heritage experience

Abstract

Today's cultural heritage sites invest heavily to incorporate augmented, mixed and virtual reality elements in their exhibitions. The quality of a visitor's experience now depends a great deal on whether they are able to find and enjoy this digital content during their visit. This study proposes, develops and analyzes modes of navigating digital content in a virtual heritage context, with an aim to improve discovery of digital content without diminishing the value of embodied, self-directed exploration of a heritage site. In an exploratory study, we examine methods and existing museographical approaches to content discovery and de ne high-level categories of digital content discovery, or "augmented discovery." A framework for deploying these discovery methods is then realized as software features of an augmented reality device called the AR Magic Lantern, which implements the novel World-as-Support paradigm by projecting AR content onto physical surfaces. The primary study deploys the augmented discovery categories explicit semaphore and embodied agents in a heritage site and compares visitor experience outcomes. Trials with visitors to a virtual cultural heritage site and subsequent analysis show that while both methods helped visitors nd and recall digital content during the visit, the embodied agents were correlated with more positive feedback and increased likeliness to promote the visit, while the explicit semaphores seemed to detract from the experience and lower the likelihood of recommending the visit to others. Finally, we propose a repetition of these trials, extended with the additional augmented discovery categories defined, deployed in-situ at museums and heritage sites with the next generation of AR Magic Lantern prototype.