**1. Introduction**

The development of technology during the last decades has allowed the implementation of new ways of interacting between people and computers. The progress of digital information has also significantly affected the evolution of cultural heritage (CH) dissemination [1], offering new possibilities for developing, e.g., the market of tourist services [2]. Whether it is a mobile application, an online catalog, or a social media exchange, these new paradigms are affecting all aspects of our lives, reshaping the way we communicate, learn, and approach the world around us [3]. One of these technologies that offers new ways of interacting is augmented reality (AR). This technology has a tremendous potential for the promotion and preservation of CH. People are starting to be receptive—they want social and collaborative experiences that combine learning with having fun. CH organizations have to address their needs by creating innovative applications [4], and AR and mixed reality can make this happen. Computers have become more accessible and cheap enough for widespread applications in various fields [5]. CH can take advantage of this development by bringing cultural vestiges to light with the help of systems that can integrate computer-generated digital information with the physical world.

AR technology gives a different perception of reality, as it enriches reality with a computer-generated layer containing visual, audio, and tactile information. In this way, any object can be recreated and used as content for AR applications. Using a 'virtual' representation of a classic museum item has several advantages: it may incorporate dynamic elements, and it allows access to aspects of the artifact that may otherwise be hidden [6]. However, in order to build a complete and complex cultural representation via digital heritage technologies, developers must also understand how users interact with the system or interface [5]. When designing AR applications, it is important to choose the best combination of techniques for presenting the appropriate electronic information to the users. The content must meet their interests and needs in order to be accepted [7]. Thus, the usability evaluation of AR applications is of prime concern. Since AR is a relatively new technology, there are few papers that address the evaluation of AR interfaces, and furthermore, their sustainability in cases such as the one presented in this paper. For this reason, we have developed an AR application with the aim of investigating its usability, taking into account perceptual and ergonomic aspects.

The 2000th anniversary of the death of the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, was in 2017. This poet was "one of the most brilliant personalities of the Augustan Age", as described in [8]. Ovid was born in 43 BC, in the town of Sulmo (today: Sulmona), located in the middle of Italy, approximately 140 km from Rome. He lived in Rome after his studies, becoming famous and appreciated for his work. After his masterpiece, the "Metamorphoses", he was exiled in 8 AD to the isolated town of Tomis (today: Constanta, Romania), on the shore of the Black Sea at the outer edge of the Roman Empire. He was abruptly removed from the stimulating artistic and social community, which had nourished his extraordinarily successful poetic career, for reasons which were lost in the millennia. He died in Tomis 9 years later, still hoping for a pardon, which never came [9].

In line with the linguistic community, this anniversary highlights a good opportunity to give people a variety of ways to remember this great personality, whose vast influence and popularity continues to this day [10]. This heritage should not be lost, yet keeping it is not an easy task. The methodology of this study is based on bringing to life some creative moments from Ovid's existence. We have chosen three significant cities for the poet: Sulmona, Rome, and Constanta. By means of AR technologies and using mobile devices, we've created an application that was presented to the general public.

In this regard, the application tested had appropriate content for each location: Sulmona, where Ovid was born; Rome, where he has lived most of his life; and Tomis, where he died (Figure 1). Each version of the application recreates some aspects of his life, presenting his 3D animated model in the three stages of his life: as a child, as a famous public person, and as an exiled person in decline, but still artistically creative.

**Figure 1.** Three cities significant in Ovid's life, where the application was tested by the general public.

AR and virtual reality (VR) are technologies that allow us to bring to life lost historical periods of time, while protecting the real artifacts for generations to come. From this point of view, the main objective of this research was to introduce mobile augmented reality (MAR) as a means to present CH, and to sustainably reuse digital content for general public dissemination.

We proposed the corresponding research objectives: to model and design an attractive application that could be used by tourists and local citizens to learn more about the life of Ovid. To recreate the historical context of that time by using graphical representations enhanced with audio content. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of that application.

This article is structured as follows: Section 2 describes related work and sets the context of this paper. Section 3 describes the application and the experiment setup. Section 4 presents the evaluation results. In Section 5, the findings are summarized and, finally, Section 6 reports conclusions and future work.
