Collaborative Augmented Reality for Cultural Contexts

Dear Colleagues,

In cultural heritage scenarios, visitors should never be considered as passive spectators.

In order to establish a learning process with the historical contents, visitors should play an active role. A helpful tool in this regard comes from augmented reality technology (AR), which is able to extend the real world with synthetic contents, contributing to offering richer and more engaging experiences.

Usually the AR experience is a single-user experience. Nowadays, it is increasingly important to encourage collaboration between the different categories of users, for instance by means of a social networking platform that require direct interaction. This is what we mean by collaborative AR, which allows multiple users to look at the same content and to create information, data, and new contents that could be shared among users. It should be taken into account that social platforms are one of the most powerful tools for creating networks of people and distributing content within the community.

In this specific scenario, users are visitors of public spaces, they can enjoy interactive visits, gain access to inaccessible areas, and in turn create contents in a participatory and collaborative way by sharing geo-located annotations.

In the same way, these technologies could offer cultural planners the possibility of analyzing user-generated data, attractively improving tourism, promoting points of interest, collecting digital footprints, and improving decision making processes.

Experimentation with such innovative tools and methods within, for instance, the old town of a city, could allow its revitalization and the reinvention of the heritage fruition without losing the historical identity of the center.

This Special Issue encourages the submission of research into collaborative augmented reality for cultural contexts.

Selected papers presented at the Salento AVR 2019 International Conference (www.salentoavr.it) are invited to submit extended versions to this Special Issue of the journal Information. All submitted papers will undergo our standard peer-review procedure. Accepted papers will be published in open access format in Information and collected together on the Special Issue website.

Conference papers should be cited and noted on the first page of the paper, and authors are asked to disclose that it is a conference paper in their cover letter and to include a statement on what has changed compared to the original conference paper. Please note that submitted extended papers should contain at least 40% new content (e.g., in the form of technical extensions, more in-depth evaluations, or additional use cases) and not exceed 30% copy/paste from the conference paper.

Prof. Lucio Tommaso De Paolis
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Augmented reality in cultural heritage
• Collaborative environments
• Collaborative augmented reality
• Multiuser augmented reality applications