Touching the Past: Developing and Evaluating A Heritage kit for Visualizing and Analyzing Historical Artefacts Using Tangible Augmented Reality

My research explores the use of tangible user interfaces and augmented reality to interact with virtual representations of historical artefacts within the cultural heritage domain. As a practice-led research, this research project aims to design, develop and evaluate tangible user interfaces combined with augmented reality to provide cultural heritage professionals and archaeology experts with an accessible and intuitive tangible augmented reality interface for the visualization, analysis and interpretations of historical artefacts. This research is interdisciplinary in nature combining the fields of design, HCI and heritage; and the newly explored interaction methods will suggest new possibilities for the future of Tangible User Interfaces and augmented reality research in general and cultural heritage in particular. In the first year of my PhD, I developed a prototype that showcased a tangible interface to interact with augmented historical artefacts, and preliminary testing with experts yielded very positive results. In the second year, the research will investigate how different tangible interaction methods in augmented reality can promote realism and immersion and enhance the user experience.