Be Our Guest: Intercultural Heritage Exchange through Augmented Reality (AR)

This paper explores how interactive applications can help mitigate the adversity of facing cultural differences between migrants and the host community, and between migrants of diverse backgrounds to foster intercultural exchange. Based on literature about situated cognition, immersive theater, and affordance, we designed and built Be Our Guest: an augmented reality application where a user is invited to the houses of people from different cultures and is asked to help with one of their cultural rituals around simple everyday objects. We detail the various phases we took to collect the cultural stories and construct the application. We then report the results of a user study with the developed application. Our findings show that participants were easily immersed in the augmented space due to the app’s narrative, visuals, and interactive nature. Moreover, they enjoyed exploring cultural rituals, including their own, and felt more confident connecting with people from other cultures.