RelicCARD: Enhancing cultural relics exploration through semantics-based augmented reality tangible interaction design

Cultural relics visualization brings digital archives of relics to broader audiences in many applications, such as education, historical research, and virtual museums. However, previous research mainly focused on modeling and rendering the relics. While enhancing accessibility, these techniques still provide limited ability to improve user engagement. In this paper, we introduce RelicCARD, a semantics-based augmented reality (AR) tangible interaction design for exploring cultural relics. Our design uses an easily available tangible interface to encourage the users to interact with a large collection of relics. The tangible interface allows users to explore, select, and arrange relics to form customized scenes. To guide the design of the interface, we formalize a design space by connecting the semantics in relics, the tangible interaction patterns, and the exploration tasks. We realize the design space as a tangible interactive prototype and examine its feasibility and effectiveness using multiple case studies and an expert evaluation. Finally, we discuss the findings in the evaluation and future directions to improve the design and implementation of the interactive design space.