An Afternoon at the Museum: Through the Lens of Augmented Reality

This paper addresses how Augmented Reality (AR) can be used as a tool to provide a different dimension to the museum experience, 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 authors discovered that this could be a powerful tool for museums, which have to grapple with the question of how to engage their visitors and present information in a captivating way. Therefore an AR application prototype was developed. Museum visitors were subsequently invited to participate in an experiment, which had the objective of gauging the value of AR and whether or not it made a significant difference towards the museum experience. 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.