Abstract—As immersive technologies have become ubiquitous today, traditional museums are finding success augmenting existing exhibits to increase visitors’ satisfaction. However, due to the immutable nature of house museums, and their tendency to place visitors in direct contact with historical artifacts, museum managers are seeking original approaches to cultural preservation. Implementing mixed reality systems into historic house museums is one such approach.
The goal of this study is to develop and test a conceptual matrix that guides how designers use the affordances of mixed reality systems to create experiences that align with the range of historical narratives found in house museums. Experiences that can contribute to improving visitors’ satisfaction, self-interpretation, and understanding of the homeowner’s life and the community within which they lived.
Building on human-centered design methods, the researcher developed and tested a prototype of an augmented reality (AR) mobile application centered on the Pope House Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. The outcome of the research suggests house museum visitors should have agency in deciding the lens through which they experience the variety of historical narratives present in the home.
Index Terms—Augmented reality, cultural preservation, experiential value, historic house museums, mixed reality systems.
Shadrick Addy is with The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 USA (e-mail: addy.29@osu.edu).
Cite: Shadrick Addy, "History Re-Experienced: Implementing Mixed Reality Systems into Historic House Museums," International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 311-316, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).