The Ethics of Engagement: Designing for Augmented Reality Experiences at Sites of Dark Tourism

Abstract

Various augmented reality (AR) experiences are located in or connected to places of anguish, pain, and death. The existing AR scholarship has not addressed the ethical design, development, and facilitation of these encounters. This study offers fundamental guidelines for how AR might be ethically constructed to promote a respectful experience to close this knowledge gap.Dark tourism is a subfield of tourism studies that refers to any form of travel that involves tragedy, horror, misery, or murder. Based on this research, the report makes several recommendations for developing moral AR experiences at dark tourist destinations before, during, and after a visit. AR can become a moral and practical extension of contemplating mortality if spectacle is controlled in these unsettling locations. The study offers design recommendations for morally acceptable AR experiences for dark tourism destinations already involved in the marketing and consumption of the macabre.