CultAR · Culturally Enhanced Augmented Realities

CultAR will provide a mobile platform that 1) actively increases users' awareness of their cultural surroundings with advanced, adaptable and personalized interfaces, 2) increase users' social engagement with culture via a leap in social media technologies and contextual inference methods. To reach these goals, CultAR will advance the State of the Art in mobile 3D, augmented reality and tactile technologies, combining them into a completely new mobile experience interface. The CultAR platform achieves personalised and engaging digital cultural experiences through enhanced representation, hybrid space mediation, social engagement and awareness.Adaptability and context awareness will be enhanced through dynamic 3D models of urban environments with an ability to control all aspects of the representation, including dynamic content such as the presence of other users (real and virtual) and user created Culture Ghosts, applying various emphasis methods that draw the attention of the user to potentially interesting cultural content.A user-centric approach is applied throughout the development. During the first phase, scenarios are designed together with cultural stakeholders. Application design is iterative, where end user input is directly taken into the development loop. Cultural stakeholders will provide content and expert users for CultAR.Advances in technology are verified and analyzed not just by technical benchmarking, but with both specialist analysis and on-location field experiments in Padua, Italy and Aalborg, Denmark. Methodology in measuring user experiences is developed with thorough monitoring using eye trackers, physiological sensors, gesture tracking and gesture recognition in pursue of inferring emotional states quantitatively.