The Augmented Museum: A Multimodal, Game-Based, Augmented Reality Narrative for Cultural Heritage

Abstract

As digitization has transformed media and Augmented Reality (AR) is evolving from a research area to a commodity, museums are creating interactive AR experiences to digitally enhance their collection and increase audience engagement. Head-worn AR experiences, though, face interaction challenges as they are often employed in busy spaces and are in need of intuitive multimodal interfaces for users on the move. This paper presents an innovative, work-in-progress, multimodal AR experience integrating non-obtrusive dialogue, music, and sound as well as gesture and gaze-based interaction, while a user is wearing a head-worn AR display. Users are motivated to explore and interact with digital cultural artefacts superimposed onto the real-world museum setting and physical artefacts, while moving around in a museum setting. We initially analyze interactive AR experiences to identify specific user requirements related to head-worn AR experiences. We deploy these requirements for the design of interactive, multimodal AR in a museum setting.