Using Augmented Reality and Social Media in Mobile Applications to Engage People on Cultural Sites

One of the toughest challenges that curators and professionals in the heritage sector face is how to attract, engage and retain visitors of heritage institutions. The current approaches have only limited success since they still follow the same centralized strategy of producing and delivering cultural content to the general public. This paper provides an overview of current trends in information technology that are most relevant to cultural institutions, and investigates how augmented reality, gamification, storytelling and social media can improve visitors’ experience by providing new means of participation, proposing a radically new approach in defining cultural content and creating personalised experiences with cultural heritage objects. The paper considers actual use cases provided by the European research project TAG CLOUD to define the functional range of suitable applications and proposes a set of system components that are being implemented in TAG CLOUD.