"Social Heritage" Augmented Reality Application to Heritage Education

Heritage education can be conceived as a pedagogical and didactical process focusing on knowledge, perceptions and values of Heritage being part of a society and interpreted and known by people. This process can be offered to a society by any educational institution in formal contexts, but also by specialized organizations or persons in informal contexts. For instance, it is common to see citizens learning about heritage in their own cities, but also learning about heritage as tourists in other cities. Nowadays, the processes of heritage education in informal contexts have been supported by those technologies such as tourist guides, audio guides, and tactile televisions, among others. However, technologies such as augmented reality, contribute to the knowledge of heritage in a contextualized, situated, and enriched learning process. The purpose of this paper is to present Social Heritage, and a solution aiming to develop heritage education processes based on augmented reality. Social Heritage runs in mobile devices; it is based on the collaborative construction of heritage content and can be used in both, formal and informal learning contexts.