R. Shumaker and S. Lackey (Eds.): VAMR 2014, Part II, LNCS 8526, pp. 85–95, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 The Application of Augmented Reality for Reanimating Cultural Heritage Sasithorn Rattanarungrot, Martin White, Zeeshan Patoli, and Tudor Pascu Interactive Systems Group, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom, BN1 9QJ {s.rattanarungrot,m.white,m.z.patoli,t.pascu}@sussex.ac.uk Abstract. This paper presents the design of a service-oriented architecture to support dynamic cultural content acquisition on a mobile augmented reality sys- tem for reanimating cultural heritage. The reanimating cultural heritage system provides several domain interfaces (Web, Web3D, Mobile and Augmented Re- ality) for presenting cultural objects accessed from an aggregated RCH data re- pository via web services. This paper largely focuses on the augmented reality system, but discusses the Web, Web3D and Mobile domains to set the paper in context. The mobile augmented reality system performs multiple objects track- ing to augment digital media contents on real world cultural object scenes. The proposed mobile augmented reality system is composed of a mobile interface (smartphone, tablet), middleware including the augmented reality SDK and supporting software modules for the augmented reality application, and a web service framework. Keywords: service-oriented architecture, multiple object tracking, web service framework, augmented reality. 1 Introduction Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Reanimating cultural heritage is a Beyond Text Large Project [1][2][3] funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The resource can be viewed live at www.sierraleoneheritage.org and it currently holds some 3,000 plus digital cultural objects. The project’s full title is ‘Reanimating Cul- tural Heritage: Digital Repatriation, Knowledge Networks and Civil Society Streng- thening in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone’. The Reanimating Cultural Heritage (RCH) project is a “multidisciplinary project concerned with innovating digital curatorship in relation to Sierra Leonean collections dispersed in the global museumscape” [1]. The project is mainly concerned with establishing a digital repository and primary web interface that allows Sierra Leonean diaspora to access their heritage (cultural objects) digitally while also allowing the diaspora to contribute, through a social media context, their knowledge [3]. illustrates the Home page (with a two randomly selected media objects: in this case a video illustrating aluminium pot making, and a cultural object displayed in the ‘From the collection’ interface) and shows the Browse