Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Applications such as Pokémon Go (www.pokemongo.com) have led to an increased awareness, interest and use of augmented reality (AR) for everyday uses (Rauschnabel et al., 2017). The overlay of digital information onto users’ direct surroundings provides opportunities for various industries, including the enhancement of the tourism experience (tom Dieck and Jung, 2015). The recent success and emergence of AR can be directly linked to the penetration of smartphones, which in turn have long been considered for mediating tourist experiences (Wang et al., 2012). Previous researchers have asserted that cultural heritage tourism has become one of the dominant and successful tourism sectors served by mobile AR applications (Portalés et al., 2009; Tutunea, 2013). Within the cultural heritage tourism context, AR can be used to digitally restore artifacts or re-create historic events as well as preventing the degradation of cultural heritage sites (Haugstvedt and Krogstie, 2012; Portalés et al., 2009; Stanco et al., 2012). Overall, AR applications were found to create enjoyable, meaningful and enhanced tourism experiences (Jung et al., 2015). Over the past five years, a number of cultural heritage institutions (Deoksugung and Gyeongbokgung Palaces in South Korea, An Post Museum in Ireland, the Louvre in France and the British Museum in the UK) all over the world have developed and implemented mobile AR applications.
Research on AR has expanded over the past years, with scholars’ interests including user acceptance (Jung et al., 2015), user experience (Han et al., 2017), user requirements (tom Dieck et al., 2016), perceived value (tom Dieck and Jung, 2017), value co-creation (Jung and tom Dieck, 2017), wearable AR (Rauschnabel et al., 2015, Tussyadiah et al., 2017) and the tourism learning experience (Moorhouse et al., 2017). However, there are only a few studies within the hospitality context, and those that exist have focused on AR’s navigation opportunities and finding points of interest such as hotels and restaurants (Marimon et al., 2010; Mulloni et al., 2010). Tuominen and Ascenção (2016) looked at tomorrow’s hotel and explored new technologies and their effect on service design. However, although they acknowledge that the future hotel room will include augmented experiences, a specific investigation of AR was not conducted. Augment (2016, p....