PEAR 4 VXO : A case study using an Augmented Reality framework to facilitate public engagement

Although the concept of Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for some years, particularly taking advantage of the availability of smartphone and tablet devices, it has not quite reached the mainstream1. However, the recent success of the mobile game Pokemon GO has considerably contributed to the public’s interest in mobile AR. This paper presents our initial efforts towards a framework for facilitating public engagement through mobile AR, that fall under the overall project title “Augmented Reality for Public Engagement” (PEAR). Althoughboth Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies are becoming more accepted, their adoption for interdisciplinary purposes, especially in relation to the Humanities, is usually focused on the visual aspect (e.g. recreating a historical location, or digitising and displaying artefacts)2 and thus not taking advantage of another very important aspect which is the possibility to interact with the virtual content. We position our work in relation to the field of Digital Humanities as providing a framework that allows people to engage and interact in-situ with virtual content that can be the visualization of people’s consensus, but also an aggregation of multiple sources of data.