Published on the occasion of the Joint Conference on Serious Games (JCSG 2024, which took place in New York City), LoGaCulture researchers Jessica Bitter and Ulrike Spierling present new findings on co-presence and playful interaction in immersive Augmented Reality (AR) for cultural heritage.
As museums and cultural heritage sites increasingly adopt immersive technologies, one challenge has come sharply into focus: the isolating nature of Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), which can hinder the social and collaborative experiences that are often integral to museum visits. In their latest paper Against Isolation in the Museum: Playful Co-presence with Immersive Augmented Reality,” Jessica Bitter and Ulrike Spierling tackle this very issue, advancing both scholarly and design-based understanding of collaborative AR in cultural settings.
Presented at JCSG 2024 and published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series by Springer, the paper begins with a systematic literature review identifying how co-located, multi-user AR applications have so far been used in museums. While the review uncovered a limited number of existing examples — just 15 studies — the authors used these insights to distill five key parameters that can guide the design of collaborative AR experiences: ownership, attributes, lifetime, visibility, instancing, and mutability.
Based on these design dimensions, Bitter and Spierling developed a prototype AR experience: a quiz-like collaborative game in which participants identify and label vertebrate bones. This prototype not only fostered interaction among users but was shown—through a formative evaluation using the Networked Minds Questionnaire—to significantly enhance communication and enjoyment during use.
This research is at the heart of the LoGaCulture project’s mission to explore location-based games for cultural spaces. By rethinking how digital technologies support collective learning, the project brings together playful design and cultural engagement in meaningful ways. The findings of this paper offer practical strategies to make immersive AR less isolating and more aligned with how people naturally visit and learn in museum contexts—together.
Looking ahead, the team plans to continue developing prototypes and conduct large-scale evaluations in real museum environments, as they aim to explore how assigning fixed roles in collaborative AR games may further influence communication and group dynamics.
As LoGaCulture continues to shape the future of digital interaction in cultural heritage spaces, this research marks a crucial step toward designing immersive technologies that not only engage individuals — but bring them together.