# Augmented Reality in Cultural Heritage: An Overview of the Last Decade of Applications
## 3 Top Trending Applications of AR in Cultural Heritage
### User Experience
In [90], the authors attempt a case study of a complex AR application, which encompasses gestures and uses a 3D holographic interface and integration with the Meta platform. Apart from providing developmental details regarding the application, the paper also presents a quality assurance testing that takes place in Canada's largest museum, namely Royal Ontario Museum. This preliminary testing resulted in some issues to be addressed by the development team, such as the lack of an exact description of the gestures recognized by the application or failing to provide help in the virtual immersive environment. Figure 9: Mobile AR application for improving the experience of the tourists. Courtesy of [PERSON] et al. [6]. Another high-impact case study of an AR mobile application created as a tour guide is presented in [91], in research deployed in two directions: one regarding the detailed presentation of the developmental details and the other describing the survey designed to evaluate the app and the empirical results obtained by applying the survey in a user sample. While the majority of usability studies deal with assessing the effects of technology on the main beneficiaries, which are the users (or the visitors, in a museum context), in [92], the evaluation takes into account three categories of individuals: the professional in the field of cultural heritage, the institution itself, and the visitor. To this end, a model is proposed, under the name MUSETECH, that is applicable for various technologies (mobile, AR, VR) in various fields (education, museums, tangible experiences). The model proposed is suitable for evaluating the impact of technology on the three categories of individuals. A complex user-based study, with both qualitative and quantitative items, proposes discriminating between the attraction of museum visitors to AR technology in a museum gallery and their distraction by such technology by evaluating the \"attentional balance\" of visitors using the AR virtual magnifier (loupe) [93]. Four levels of experience of the user, in the context of dealing with VR applications for museums, are identified in [94]: artifact-related, behavior-related, spiritual level, and creation level. They are exploited by the VR application itself in the process of delivering information. A review of papers is provided, grouping them according to the specific level of user experience that is the purpose of the research in the paper. Finally, the paper proposes a model for the VR museum experience that relies on the four levels of experience discussed and acts as a design framework for VR-enabled museum exhibitions [94]. A communicative approach exploits gamification in the cultural heritage landscape in a complex application that uses VR by means of a head-mounted display, as well as AR by means of a mobile application, to allow virtual exploration of a 3D reconstructed temple and personalized interaction with the historical vestiges [95]. Preliminary evaluation of the prototype makes use of a preliminary analysis (prior to public exposure to the system), a survey completed during the museum visit, and a paper-based questionnaire filled out at the end of the visit. The attractiveness of outdoor heritage landmarks is enhanced by means of a mobile AR application in [96], which addresses five different historical epochs. The small usability study (15 users) uses a survey with 7-point Likert scale items grouped in order to target various traits of the application, such as comprehensibility, manipulability, enjoyment, and usefulness. We note the preference of researchers for user studies on various dimensions that translate into questionnaire items for each variable involved. At the same time, theoretical models are empirically studied and reinforced with user-based questionnaire studies [86; 87; 88; 89; 90; 91; 92].