# Mobile AR: User Evaluation in a Cultural Heritage Context
## 1 Introduction  
Cultural Heritage (CH) places, such as museums or archaeological sites, envisage pleasant visits for their visitors, while visitors want to learn, enrich themselves and have fun. This is evidenced in an internal survey made in the Conimbriga Monographic Museum-National Museum in 2014, where the main reason identified as the reason that motivated visitors to come to Conimbriga was cultural enrichment. Other reasons stated in this same survey are related to leisure time, knowledge improvement about history and archeology, to ruins' mosaics, to architecture and urbanism, and to the object collection inside the museum. To indulge the visitors' expectations, museums are always seeking for different and innovative solutions to provide information to their guests. Aside from their historic artefacts and infrastructures (or what remain of them), informative images are frequently added to specific places (digital and real), mock-ups reconstructions are showed, multimedia content (audio-visual information) is displayed, etc. Therefore, new technological approaches, such as augmented reality, has been exploited in the last few years among different museums. To better understand how this technology would be perceived by people, a proper and user-oriented use of technology should be prospected to CH contexts, attempting to come out with reliable solutions to profit visitors and institutions. The use of Augmented Reality (AR) has a positive impact on users' perspective and has been recognized as a good solution to be used in diversified areas [1]. However, AR still has not gained a solid presence in our digital society so far, expressing AR as a present and future topic to work on. Although this technology has seen an increasing popularity grow among a vast variety of areas, such as publicity [2], entertainment [3], education [4; 5], medicine [6], architecture [7], manufacturing [8], and CH [9; 10; 11], which is the particular case for this study. Although being stated as a promising tool according to literature, producing AR experiences available for visitors in cultural spaces whereby they can experience it during their visits is not a common feature available yet--when compared to the above-mentioned methods of images, flyers, or mock-up reconstructions. This gap is even more noticeable in AR experiences for outdoor spaces, such as archaeological sites, a fact that motivated this research. It is proved that AR applications in CH sites can add additional value to users' experiences [12]. However, due to some repercussions and limitations found in AR literature, before becoming broadly commercialized in tourism contexts, AR research in CH still has a long way to go [13]. Notwithstanding resourceful museums, which are already facilitating the opportunity for users to use AR in their spaces, sparking the interest of new users is important. The cases of \"Augmenting the Historic City: Trade and Merchant's Life in Ribe\", in Sydvestiyske Museum (Denmark) [14], \"The Skin and Bones\" application, in exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington (USA) [15], and the project \"England's Historic Cities\", available for 12 museums in England [16] are worth mentioning. This study aimed to evaluate a mobile augmented reality application created for outdoors to represent an ancient building--arising from the Roman civilization--which is currently in ruins. This application was tested by visitors to the Conimbriga Ruins, managed by the Conimbriga Monographic Museum-National Museum, Portugal. Taking into consideration the target audience and the place where it is intended to evaluate an AR solution, some thoughts and requirements were traced: there is no Internet or electricity available on site; outstanding marks should be avoided to not hamper a regular visit to the site; devices that would need maintenance such as batteries should be avoided; weather conditions cannot be controlled; and the users are non-experts and may not understand the limitations that the app may have.