PoeticAR: Reviving Traditional Poetry of the Heritage Site of Jichang Garden via Augmented Reality

Abstract

As a famed Chinese classical garden, the Jichang Garden was a constant inspiration to many poets in its hundreds of years’ history, who composed a rich body of poems—a valuable intangible cultural heritage. While tourists tend to pay attention to tangible natural scenery and historical architectures, they often neglect intangible cultural heritage—poems. We interviewed 23 tourists and found that augmented reality (AR) was viable for tourists to enjoy the physical scenery and the poetry simultaneously. We developed an initial prototype of PoeticAR, which presents poems based on physical scenery to enhance tourists’ cultural and aesthetic experience. We further revised the prototype based on the ideas generated from a workshop with 18 tourists. We conducted a between-subject user study with 30 tourists to compare PoeticAR with Video. Results showed that PoeticAR significantly motivated tourists’ interest in poems, enhanced the cultural and aesthetic tour experience in Jichang Garden, and increased awareness of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Cultural Heritage sites.

Notes

1 https://youtu.be/lp9VD8cleA

2 https://youtu.be/1fKoTo1j8IQ

3 Given the relatively small sample size, we consider p < 0.05 as significant, and 0.05 ≤ p < 0.10 as marginally significant, following statistical convention (Cramer & Howitt, 2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jin Tian

Jin Tian is a PhD candidate in Computational Media and Arts, from the Individualized Interdisciplinary Program, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a digital artist and researcher. His main research interests are digital art, digital humanity, computational aesthetics, and cultural computing.

Yifan Cao

Yifan Cao is a PhD candidate in Computational Media and Arts, from the Individualized Interdisciplinary Program, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include visual analytics of Blockchain data, specifically NFT, digital humanities, computational social science, data art, and VR/AR applications.

Lingyi Feng

Lingyi Feng is a PhD student in Computational Media and Arts, from the Individualized Interdisciplinary Program, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her main research interests are museology, therapeutic art, and VR.

Dongting Fu

Dongting Fu is a PhD student in the Open Media Department of the School of InterMedia Art at the China Academy of Art. His research interest is technological and Computational media, science fiction, and modern Chinese local culture.

Linping Yuan

Linping Yuan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She obtained her B.Eng. degree in Software Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, in 2019. Her research interests include Virtual/Augmented Reality, Human-Computer Interaction, and Data visualization.

Huamin Qu

Huamin Qu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and also the director of the interdisciplinary program office of HKUST. His primary research focuses on urban informatics, social network analysis, E-learning, text visualization, and explainable artificial intelligence.

Yang Wang

Yang Wang is a Chair Professor of HKUST in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics and the Department of Mathematics. Director of HKUST The Big Data for Bio Intelligence Laboratory and Associate Director of HKUST Big Data Institute.

Mingming Fan

Mingming Fan is an Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He directs the Accessible & Pervasive User Experience (APEX) group to conduct research in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Aging and Accessibility, and VR/AR/XR.