Towards Enhancing User Experience through a Web-Based Augmented Reality Museum

Museums act as a vehicle to collect, preserve and demonstrate historical, cultural and scientific heritage to a larger community of end users. However, there is neither increase in the number of physical visitors nor visitors to online museum, despite their availability on the web. On the other hand, Augmented Reality has emerged as a potential technology to support and enhance experience of end users in different communities especially in digital heritage. In this paper, we propose Augmented Reality Museum (ARM) as an application that can enhance online museum visitor experience. Augmented Reality can be integrated as a mobile application that provides 3D view of an artifact, along with information about its historic, artistic and/or scientific importance. We present the design and development of ARM and demonstrate it for the case study of Online British Museum. Our user experience study conducted with 21 volunteers shows that ARM is potentially a good way to enhance user experience.