Engaging audiences with Cultural Heritage through Augmented Reality (AR) Enhanced Pop-Up Books

Abstract

One of the core activities of memory institutions is to provide access to heritage material from their collections so that it can be used in formal and informal educational activities. Although this type of access is beneficial for audiences, we argue that current digital technologies for access still require users to know in which collection they must look for a specific subject or type of content. Although collection aggregators, such as Europeana and Google Arts and Culture, have made it easier to access content across collections, there is still a lack of engaging interfaces which can draw the interest amongst a wide range of audiences for exploring heritage material. In this research, we propose a tangible interface for accessing Cultural Heritage (CH) content in the form of a pop-up book. Pop-up books are a highly engaging way to get audiences to interact with materials in archives and collections. Our approach is creative and playful as it takes advantage of both the narrative and the three-dimensional and tactile nature of pop-up books so that audiences can engage with digital content through Augmentation Reality (AR). The technical contributions of the paper include a method to enable real-time interaction between the physical elements of the book and the virtual content. Unlike other AR pop-up books that generate purely virtual pop-up content, our design preserves the original 3D model inside the books and generates virtual effects on those objects, making our application more appealing and engaging than other AR books. This approach and technical method are deployed using a commercially available pop-up book with stories about various famous landmarks in the city of London. Content drawn from heritage collections enriches the stories told in the book with additional visual content and interactions. Initial tests of this approach suggest that it has the potential to engage audiences who will not be traditionally inclined to access other platforms with CH content.