Designing an extended reality mobile guide application to communicate and interpret serial world heritage sites: A case study of Korea’s Seowon UNESCO world heritage site

Abstract

Extended reality (XR) mobile guide applications offer unprecedented potential for immersive visitor experiences and in-depth knowledge retention to promote cultural learning at large-scale heritage sites, but, despite their significant development, the literature underexplores these applications for World Heritage sites, especially the serial properties that are spatially dispersed in various locations but configured as a single property. This paper describes a framework (blueprint) for the development of an XR mobile guide application focused on serial properties. By incorporating interactive XR and edutainment features, it explores a way to comprehensively reveal the interconnections between the heritage attributes of the subcomponent of the serial properties and their larger, cross-cultural context vis-à-vis the Outstanding Universal Values. To this end, at the Seowon, the UNESCO World Heritage site in Korea, we analyzed user interactions with a prototype of the XR application to identify user preferences and areas for improving the framework.