Study on Mobile AR Guide System to Enhance User Experience in Cultural Heritage Sites

An outdoor mobile Augmented Reality (AR) system that integrates location-based navigation and puzzle game as an auxiliary tool for user experience in cultural heritage sites is designed. The proposed system is developed to provide learning information about cultural heritage sites and allow participants to interact with both virtual and physical objects. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, an experiment is conducted in an actual cultural heritage site. The experiment is to compare the performance between the AR group and the non-AR group of participants in terms of learning effectiveness, focusing time, direction awareness, and the performance of the system. The performance factors include navigation accuracy, easiness of system, interaction naturalness, attraction, immersion and participants' attitude towards the AR system. The evaluation results show that the AR system can enhance participants' learning effectiveness and extend focusing time comparing to the non-AR system. Besides, it can improve participants' direction awareness in visiting cultural heritage sites. The AR guide system is more interactive and participants in the AR guide group can comprehend more content about the physical environment. The AR guide system is proved more attractive and interesting. Most of the participants think that the AR guide system is a better approach to navigation.