(Re)Engineering Cultural Heritage Contexts using Creative Human Computer Interaction Techniques and Mixed Reality Methodologies

What Are The Requirements For Effective Digital Intervention Within The Cultural Heritage Sector?

The central challenge for curators and educational designers is to create contexts that promote effective and engaging learning. With the generation and increasing adoption of mobile augmented reality (MAR) and mixed reality methodologies and techniques we now have the potential to explode the form and complexity of these learning contexts. The core question of this research is can we develop augmented heritage contexts that are more effective because they take advantage of the affordances of these mixed reality methods and techniques. The majority of mobile learning research and mobile app development creates experiences which tie all the requirements of the user’s attention down to and onto a four inch screen. This includes the majority of MAR applications. To avoid this, new interfaces must be created that take advantage of the physical and digital affordances of each learning situation.

Gallagher (2010) defines cultural heritage as being concerned with collections of physical structures and the intangible values that they project about the culture in which they are situated. He believes MAR has the potential to augment these heritage contexts bi-directionally:

New forms of contextual representation and engineering can now do real-time interactive justice to the complexity of both the form and function of cultural heritage. However, there are some key issues to consider when deciding on a technological solution. Boyer and Marcus (2011) state that an unfortunate fact of most augmented reality applications is that screenshots of an application give a better impression of the functionality than the actual use. In addition, without thoughtful design, digital interventions risk distracting visitors from meaningful engagement with the cultural objects that they are actually designed to augment.

What Are The Affordances Of Mixed And Augmented Reality?

In order to achieve the aim of designing and supporting learning across physical and virtual heritage space we need to combine the affordances of the physical with the affordances of the digital. This gives us an opportunity to reinvest value back into the full thick description of physical site specific space and at the same time ensure we are using embodied experience (and not just vision as is common in most AR) to interact with these spaces. In Kevin Slavins mobile Monday presentation Reality is plenty thanks (2010) he discusses the importance of peripheral vision in learning situations by illustrating how reality is not actually communicated via a single focus.