Exploring place and direction: mobile augmented reality in the Astrid Lindgren landscape

This paper describes the design process and user evaluation of an outdoor educational mobile augmented reality application. The main goal was to enhance and augment the experience of a visit to a culturally significant place, the childhood home of the children's book author Astrid Lindgren. Visiting sites of historical significance is not limited to the cultural experience itself, but can be seen as an opportunity for learning and exploring a place as it is now and as it has been in past times. By investigating the two design dimensions place and time, our application was conceived as a treasure hunt, where users activate content by moving between places and pointing the mobile device in different directions or at different markers. The application was field tested with mixed groups of children and adults. The evaluation indicates that the prototype did encourage both learning and exploring, which also was the design objective.