Improving User Experience for Lost Heritage Sites with a User-Centered Indirect Augmented Reality Application

“Clavis Aurea”: An augmented Reality Game for the Teaching of Local History

“…The game's usability is likely due to the fact that it was enhanced with audiovisual materials, as well as messages from fictional figures, such as the pirate Markos Sanoudos. According to previous studies, these elements increase the degree of digital games' usability and improve their flow [38], [39]. Moreover, one of the conclusions arising from this study is that the features of the archaeological site of the Castle, in which the AR game takes place, may have affected students' motivation to explore the area and complete all the missions contained in the game.…”

A Literature Review of User Studies in Extended Reality Applications for Archaeology

“…Mobile devices are often strictly related to onsite visits. Some examples include the historical site of the Viking fortress of Aggersborg [38], the prehistoric rock art paintings in Cova dels Cavalls [8], and the reconstruction of the Cisneros Marketplace in Medellin [35]. When developing AR-based mobile application for outdoor settings, there are several issues that system designers and researchers have to consider such as the problem of brightness, limited battery usage, and overheating of devices when used during summer time [47].…”

“…For the content-dependent systems (33% or 18 articles), usually they are bound to an archaeological site, such as the underwater site of Baiae [76] or the ruins of Conimbriga [50]. They may be developed for a city area with a relevant archaeological past, such as Malolos City [24] or Viking fortress of Aggersborg [38]. These types of systems usually use mobile user-centric devices.…”

“…This includes modifying the scene [31], taking notes [3], creating objects [9], manipulating and analysing objects [3,14,30,33,41,43,46,63,64,66], breaking objects in the scene [20], and changing illumination [23,34,67] or timeline [28,34]. In contrast, passive interaction involves the systems in which the user's actions are limited to exploring the scene [5,6,12,13], looking around [35,38,62,65,75], watching or pausing the scene [33,53], and getting information from points of interests [19,76] or from non-player characters [73]. The interaction within these systems is not always the centre of the user study: for example, in the case of storytelling [47,68] or when the visual quality is the focus [64].…”

“…In few cases (e.g., [28,41,62,69]), the participants are also directly interviewed in a subjective manner to collect their impression at the moment of the user study without the rigidity of a pre-structured survey in order to "capture ground-truth data" [62]. While using the system, think-aloud feedback [3,5,38,52,53,67,73,75] or direct observation [38,62] are often used to acquire qualitative data. This type of feedback appears to be the preferred technique in user studies when there are usability experts evaluating a system or if a system is designed for an expert in the field.…”