Designing near-surface AR interaction for enhancing museum visitor experience

Abstract

Smartphone applications have become an essential tool for museums because of their positive impact on the visitor experience. However, smartphones may also have a negative impact by distracting visitors from the exhibit, crippling the hands-on experience. This dissertation presents WonderScope as a smartphone-based peripheral device designed to enable near-surface AR interaction with exhibits. It detects the proximity of a user’s device to a given surface, its relative location, and the orientation as a visitor moves it along the surface of exhibits in the manner of a magnifying glass. It provides visitors the experience of looking through an exhibit as if it was selectively transparent. Two comparative experiments were conducted to investigate the effect on visitor experience and behavior. The results indicated that near-surface AR provided a more intuitive understanding of exhibition content. Moreover, narrowing down the distance between visitors and exhibits promotes not only exploratory behaviors but also visitors’ social learning. This dissertation proposes a series of prototypes through an iterative design process and discusses the design knowledge and practical use in the actual museums.