Special Issue on Advanced Interaction in Cultural Heritage

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary area that focuses on computer design and user experience covering disciplines from computer science, cognitive psychology, behavioural science, and design.Advanced HCI combines human senses, requiring new strategies for the design of user experiences.This special issue focuses on HCI for covers both tangible and intangible cultural heritage.Tangible cultural heritage covers material culture and the production of physical artefacts, their maintenance and transmission in a society.Intangible cultural heritage includes the evolving knowledge and skills which are transmitted through learning and tradition.For this special issue we have accepted 10 papers, 9 research articles and 1 research report.All included articles have undergone a round of corrections before their final publication in this special issue.It is of note that they thematically cover a visibly wide-ranging variety of subjects focused on the theoretical and practical aspects related to advanced interaction in cultural heritage.The first article, entitled "Factors determining whether an art museum will offer virtual content: An empirical study in South Korea" by Ha and Kim, collected definitions of virtual museums from previous studies and identified the key attributes to then suggest a comprehensive definition.The paper assessed the current digitalization level of South Korea's registered art museums and examined which museum attributes determine whether there is virtual content offered by the art museum showing that the number of museums with virtual content are quite limited.The second article, entitled "Design and Evaluation for Improving Lantern Culture Learning Experience with Augmented Reality" by Li et al, described what participants learned after lantern exhibitions that combined AR, mobile websites, and paper-based exhibition brochures.Authors evaluated what a cohort of college students (n 115) learned about Intangible CH (ICH) through experiments and questionnaires and results showed that the public understood ICH better through digital technology.The third article, entitled "The Doctrine of the Mean: Chinese Calligraphy with Moderate Visual Complexity Elicits High Aesthetic Preference" by Han et al, proposed a computational method to evaluate complexity and conducted several perception studies.Results showed that layout features and calligraphy style (regular script, running script, and cursive script) affected visual complexity.The level of visual complexity (low, medium, and high) affected aesthetic preference, but calligraphy style did not.