Enhancing cultural heritage outdoor experience with augmented-reality smart glasses

Technologies such as context-aware mobile augmented reality (MAR) offer new ways of delivering information and creating new experiences for visitors of cultural heritage (CH) sites. Significant progress has been made in MAR for indoor museum visits. However, studies investigating the way that visitors interact with MAR in an open-air museum are lacking, as are studies aimed at identifying major usability and technology acceptance issues. This paper presents a special type of MAR—an augmented reality smart glasses (ARSG)-based mobile guide that served as a testbed for exploring the potential of ARSG to enhance visitor experience at outdoor CH sites. We developed the ARSG-based guide with location and orientation-based functionalities that provided visitors with context-aware information regarding the points of interest (POIs) in their field of view (FOV). We compared it with a more conventional smartphone-based guide (identical application). The results show that visitors are positive towards using ARSG as a tool for exploring cultural heritage (CH) sites and learning about exhibits. The results also highlighted several challenges that must be overcome before an ARSG-based system can be fully implemented for outdoor CH sites. Nonetheless, the visitors’ positive attitude indicates that ARSG technology may soon become an accepted part of CH tourism (and tourism in general).