Cultural Sprawl: The Opportunities of AR for Museum Communication

This paper explores how Augmented Reality can extend museum communication beyond institutional walls by connecting cultural collections with urban public space. Developed through a collaboration between the Museo Egizio of Turin and Politecnico di Torino, the project proposes a mobile AR application centered on the funerary assemblage of Kha and Merit. Users engage with interactive storytelling and gamified experiences distributed across key locations in Turin, where digital avatars and reconstructed artefacts appear in real environments through AR. The app combines 3D modelling, animation, educational narratives, and location-based interaction to create new relationships between museum objects, city landmarks, and visitors. Through playful tasks involving the senet game, the Book of the Dead, Merit’s toiletries, and a final X-ray preview of the museum galleries, the system encourages users to visit the museum while learning about ancient Egyptian life and beliefs. The research demonstrates AR’s potential to transform museums into distributed cultural ecosystems accessible before, during, and beyond the physical visit.