Usage Scenarios and Evaluation of Augmented Reality and Social Services for Libraries

Abstract

Libraries are cultural environments that aggregate large volumes of cultural content accessible by experts and the broad public. The continuous attraction and engagement of visitors, along with the production of revenue for the institute are two of the biggest challenges in such an environment. In this work, we propose the provision of Augmented Reality and social services trying to address those challenges. We implement and use as a testbed Active Visitor, a system that offers such services aiming at investigating services’ acceptability by visitors and librarians. We propose and implement a series of usage scenarios that use such services in order to facilitate the user activities within a library environment. A specific evaluation methodology is applied to stress the strength of the presented services. The evaluation results provide a first positive indication about the benefits that Augmented Reality and social services introduce in a library environment.