Mobile AR Interaction Design Patterns for Storytelling in Cultural Heritage: A Systematic Review

The recent advancements in mobile technologies have enabled the widespread adoption of augmented reality (AR) to enrich cultural heritage (CH) digital experiences. Mobile AR leverages visual recognition capabilities and sensor data to superimpose digital elements into the user’s view of their surroundings. The pervasive nature of AR serves several purposes in CH: visitor guidance, 3D reconstruction, educational experiences, and mobile location-based games. While most literature reviews on AR in CH focus on technological aspects such as tracking algorithms and software frameworks, there has been little exploration of the expressive affordances of AR for the delivery of meaningful interactions. This paper (based on the PRISMA guidelines) considers 64 selected publications, published from 2016 to 2023, that present mobile AR applications in CH, with the aim of identifying and analyzing the (mobile) AR (interaction) design patterns that have so far been discussed sporadically in the literature. We identify sixteen (16) main UX design patterns, as well as eight (8) patterns with a single occurrence in the paper corpus, that have been employed—sometimes in combination—to address recurring design problems or contexts, e.g., user navigation, representing the past, uncovering hidden elements, etc. We analyze each AR design pattern by providing a title, a working definition, principal use cases, and abstract illustrations that indicate the main concept and its workings (where applicable) and explanation with respect to examples from the paper corpus. We discuss the AR design patterns in terms of a few broader design and development concerns, including the AR recognition approach, content production and development requirements, and affordances for storytelling, as well as possible contexts and experiences, including indoor/outdoor settings, location-based experiences, mobile guides, and mobile games. We envisage that this work will thoroughly inform AR designers and developers abot the current state of the art and the possibilities and affordances of mobile AR design patterns with respect to particular CH contexts.