AI-enhanced extended reality (XR) technologies are increasingly relevant to cultural heritage, yet existing reviews often focus on specific applications, XR modalities, or educational outcomes, while giving less attention to hardware, infrastructure, and deployment conditions that shape user experience, interaction design, heritage interpretation, engagement, and learning. This creates a practical and analytical gap for professionals who must evaluate rapidly evolving technologies and decide which solutions are feasible, sustainable, and meaningful for their institutional needs. In this work, we create a reference point for cultural heritage professionals — museum curators, archaeologists, librarians, historians, architects, researchers, and other stakeholders — by navigating them through recent advances in available and emerging hardware and equipment for the establishment and operation of AI-enhanced XR cultural environments. Methodologically, we perform a scoping review based on the Arksey and O’Malley Framework and the PRISMA-ScR statement, mapping heterogeneous technical evidence across cultural contexts and disciplines. We propose a taxonomy of deployment contexts and users, allowing readers to relate technologies to specific cultural scenarios. Reviewed technologies are classified into six domains: AR wearables and smart glasses, holograms, metaverse and virtual worlds, UAVs and drones, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces. For each domain, we discuss AI integration, key specifications, available solutions, advantages, limitations, challenges, future trends, and promising architectures. We examine cross-cutting AI hardware shared across these domains. Beyond cataloguing technologies, the review considers how technological choices enable or constrain interpretive clarity, accessibility, scalability, engagement, and learning. Finally, we propose a comparative framework to support technology selection and strategic planning in cultural heritage environments.
Koukopoulos et al. (Mon,) studied this question.