A digital look at physical museum exhibits: Designing personalized stories with handheld Augmented Reality in museums

In this paper we present the design of handheld Augmented Reality (AR) experiences that are seamlessly incorporated into interactive museum narratives, specifically for the Acropolis Museum. The experiences start by forming a visitor profile that later dynamically adapts the narrative, including the AR activities, to the user`s behaviour. In this cohesive narrative context, the AR activities provide four ways to digitally look at the exhibits: virtual reconstruction of the original aspect; placement in the original location; visual highlighting of interesting details and annotations; and recreation of mythological appearances. The challenges of this design are presented, conluding with a discussion and lessons learned.