3. ART for Art: Augmented Reality Taxonomy for Art and Cultural Heritage

Existing augmented reality (AR) taxonomies act as generic classifiers of AR systems and do not provide any insights into technology adoption for a given use context. For this reason, this chapter proposes an alternative activity-based taxonomy method that is designed for technology adopters and aims to highlight how well are opportunities created by advances in technology really utilized in a specific context. The proposed method is evaluated on the case study of AR technology adoption in the context of art and cultural heritage. In this process, we build an AR taxonomy for art and cultural heritage which was used to classify 86 AR applications in this domain. The results of classification provided meaningful technology adoption insights, such as: (i) general lack of support for personalization and communication activities of visiting a museum where applications fail to exploit AR potential such as providing support for: context aware bookmarking, artistic expression of the visitor (e.g. enabling visitors to curate augmentations for the exhibited artefacts), sharing the visit experience of “I was here”; (ii) low quality of support for analytical activity where applications fail to show interesting information such as information that is there but cannot be seen by the naked eye; (iii) low quality of support for sensual activity where provided augmentations fall short of extending the art form or the artistic experience.