Abstract
Underwater cultural heritage sites represent an attractive and exciting experience for diving tourists, even if often it is complicated for them to understand the significance and value of the remains that are usually strongly damaged and covered by the marine organisms. Thanks to the recent advancements in technologies that overcome these problems, augmented reality is nowadays possible even in such harsh conditions, opening new possibilities for enhancing the diver’s experience. However, no user study has formally evaluated the usefulness and usability of augmented reality in open sea underwater environments. This paper presents two novel solutions for underwater augmented reality: a compact marker-based system for small areas, and a complex acoustic system for large areas. Both of them were deployed at an underwater cultural heritage site and evaluated by ten divers in experiments analyzing their perception and remembrance, interests, and user experience. For comparison, the same study was also performed with non-divers assessing the marker-based system on land. Results show that both systems allow divers to encounter new and exciting moments and provide valuable insights for underwater augmented reality applications.
Highlights
Cultural heritage sites are spread on land, and underwater
The systems were designed for smartphones and tablets and supported a real-time localization obtained by various techniques
Both systems were successfully evaluated at an underwater cultural heritage site
Summary
Cultural heritage sites are spread on land, and underwater. Places of great historical importance include submerged buildings, sunken ships, or ports [11]. Such sites are of interest to historians, archaeologists, tourists, and enthusiastic divers due to better accessibility of the sites and increased diving equipment availability in recent years. Augmented reality (AR) systems help with presenting similar on-land sites to the general public for a long time [54], applying AR on underwater cultural heritage sites is still very challenging. The underwater environment impedes diver’s movements and requires electronic devices to be covered from water, which causes difficulties when operating the equipment. We have limited knowledge about user experiences in underwater AR environments
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