Adopting Augmented Reality to Explore Historical Artifacts in Saudi Arabia Historical Museums

Abstract

Historical locations have many artifacts of generations that people from other cultures might not know about. Visitors to these locations want to understand the novel stories of buildings, people's lifestyles, and artifacts of centuries past. Tourism has become a digitized industry. This means that tourism is now employing technology to enhance tourism experience of locations. Technology that has been used for digital tourism is referred to as Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality is a promising technology that can deliver better understanding of the historical artifacts in Saudi Arabia. This research adopted the technology of Augmented Reality to deliver better understanding of the historical artifact in Saudi Arabia Museums. This research aims to Investigating the user experiences and expectation when exploring Saudi artifacts in historical and general locations in Saudi Arabia and to establish whether using AR technology provides an enhanced understanding of the usage of the historical artifacts and gives a richer historical context to Saudi visitors. The result of this research shows with appropriate media characteristics, museum visitors can gain a deeper understanding of non-touchable historical artifacts using the Augmented Realty application in Saudi Arabia historical museums.