# A Gamified Augmented Reality Application for Digital Heritage and Tourism
## 1 Introduction  
In today's digital cultural landscapes, people are increasingly dependent on technological tools to access digital cultural content such as musical, pictorial, and multimedia expressions that surround them [1]. In a broader sense, the digital transformation of culture has led us to the era of Smart Culture in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can help citizens to benefit from improved cultural accessibility and inclusion [2]. Moreover, Cultural Technologies (CT)--which resulted from theintegration of ICT into heritage organizations--have led to a change in the structure of the organizations and have affected the management of collections and the visitor's experience [3]. CT can hardly be defined, as they include a wide range of technologies used to support the digital transformation of culture and the operation of memory institutions (museums, galleries, libraries, etc.). Such technologies may include the Internet of Things (IoT), which may help museums offer personalized services and thus complete their mission by building a better museum of education, research, and appreciation of the heritage by wider audiences [4; 5]. Augmented Reality (AR) is featured as an important part of modern CT and--according to [PERSON] [6]--it has become the \"next big thing\", since most smartphones today have the necessary hardware and software characteristics to reproduce AR experiences (for free), and this growth has been propelled by the advertising industry. In addition, from a user-centered point of view, AR exposes visitors to an alternative interaction style, which can trigger curiosity and interest and overall can give a sense of accomplishment [7]. The main issue here is that although the use of AR has already penetrated certain market domains such as leisure and games (e.g., Pokemon Go ([[https://pokemongolive.com/](https://pokemongolive.com/)]([https://pokemongolive.com/](https://pokemongolive.com/)))), it remains rather limited in the realm of other domains such as heritage education [8]. On the other hand, museums and cultural organizations are willing to experiment using new methods of democratizing culture, such as the use of mobile devices during an in-site visit, in order to reach their audiences and attract their attention [9; 10]. A straightforward way to achieve these goals is to use AR for annotating museum scenes and providing extra information about collections or individual artefacts. Advances may include game elements introduced into the annotated scenes to offer gamified user experiences such as explorative navigation, playful interaction with museum artefacts, fantasy tours in ancient times, and more [11]. According to a Europe-wide study of [PERSON] et al. [8] on this topic, it seems that most AR digital heritage proposals reconstruct spaces and buildings in outdoors applications, and only a limited number of use cases handle objects in indoors applications (excluding simple audio tour apps using mobile devices). In the light of the new findings and recent technological advances, this study aims to introduce AR technologies into museums and galleries as a User eXperience (UX) amplifier. Apart from covering typical indoors museum AR applications that track a single object (2D or 3D artefact) and augment virtual objects and content on the top of the existing one, this paper will present a novel AR quiz game used to motivate users to revisit exhibitions. The gamified app allows on-the-spot museum visitors to navigate themselves in exhibitions using their own devices, to interact with the museum's educational media in a dynamic and fun way, spend more time on the exhibitions, gain new knowledge from the museum visit, and pay attention to details not seen in a first pass. Moreover, this study will describe how AR markers were introduced in museum context in an aesthetically accepted way without any reduction in 3D object detection stability and overall user experience quality.