Augmented Reality as a Mediator for Emotionally Engaging Stories : A case study for AR-based stories related to World War II

With the veterans who fought in World War II gradually fading away, their stories and the memory associated with war events risk to be lost forever. To help prevent this from happening, Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications were developed for 11 of the 75 personal life-changing war stories that had been selected as part of the Brabant Remembers project. This paper presents the results of a study to understand whether AR plays a role in providing emotional engagement and memorable experiences to visitors using these apps. It concerns a case study relative to the monument in Breda commemorating General Maczek, a Polish general whose army liberated the city and the southern part of the Netherlands in 1944. The results of this study help understand whether AR enables people to emotionally engage with these stories and have memorable experiences, what will allow to remember them longer