Augmented Reality: Providing a Different Dimension for Museum Visitors

This paper addresses how Augmented Reality (AR) can be used as a tool to provide different dimensions to the conventional museum experience. The principle of AR works by furbishing the actual environment with extra information, which enables users to have a different perception of reality. When integrating both the concepts of AR and Experience, the author discovered that this could be a powerful tool for museums, which have to grapple with the question of how to engage their visitors. Therefore an AR-application-prototype was developed for the Dommuseum Salzburg. The objective was to gauge the value of AR and whether or not it made a significant difference towards the museum experience. The visitor experience was assessed using the experience model (Pine/Gilmore), as well as the Museum Experience Scale (MES). On the whole, this paper aims to show how technology can be used in the curation process, by facilitating and enhancing the presentation of exhibits in a museum.