Augmented places: An impact of embodied historical experience on attitudes towards places

• We tested applicability of Augmented Reality in environmental and social psychology.
• AR application was used to recreate embodied experience of place's past.
• AR experience significantly increased emotional attitude towards historical place.
• AR experience led to increased awareness of multicultural place meaning.
• AR experience significantly contributed to decrease of memory-related ethnic bias.

AimThe purpose of this paper was to examine the possibility of using Augmented Reality to reduce memory-related ethnic bias towards places and to increase understanding of multicultural place meaning and change emotional attitudes towards historical sites.BackgroundTheoretical and empirical works suggest that the direct, embodied contact with place's history facilitates understanding of its past. Places which were deprived of historical continuity are less liked and threatened by ethnic bias in collective memory. AR technology gives a possibility of recreating past of such places and in a consequence tests an influence of experience of place's history on psychological aspects of the people-place relationship.MethodA between-subjects experiment was conducted, in which participants either walked with an AR application displaying historical photos in real environment or watched photos on computers. The chosen place was the former Jewish district in Warsaw, Poland.ResultsThe results of multiple regression analyses showed that the AR application can facilitate positive attitudes towards a place, reduce ethnic bias and enhance multicultural place meaning.ConclusionsWe argue that AR could be used as a method of reviving (multi)cultural heritage, but also as a tool of reducing prejudices and increasing openness to other cultures and traditions.