Site Experience Enhancement and Perspective in Cultural Heritage Fruition—A Survey on New Technologies and Methodologies Based on a “Four-Pillars” Approach
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper provides a survey of technologies with application on Cultural Heritage (CH), arranged around Localization, Multimodal interaction, User understanding, and Gamification.
Given the technological advances in the area of CH, the topic of the paper seems relevant. However, as it is, the paper has many deficiencies that make it unfit for publishing in my view.
An obvious deficiency is the quality of the writing. There are too many writing mistakes, which prevent a fluid reading.
Examples of this (not a comprehensive list):
“It is well known that the domain of Cultural Heritage demands to face different issues” ->
“demands to face” does not seem an adequate expression here.
“Such innovative technologies and methodologies are evermore exploited in the cultural heritage sector, simplifying the definition of installations and routes, keeping in account these issues.” ->
Which, concrete, “innovative technologies”?
How do they simplify the definition of installations and routes?
“keeping in account these issues” is hard to understand. What is to “keep in account”? What issues?
“Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR),” ->
Should be “Augmented Reality (AR)”
“As concerns the applications, starting from games, the of both VR and AR has been” ->
“the of both VR and AR has been” should perhaps be “both VR and AR have been”
“higher granularity” ->
Maybe “finer granularity” would be more appropriate as opposed to a “coarser granularity”.
“user exploits” ->
Exploits is not appropriate the way it was used
“more complex algorithms. [71], [72].” ->
Sentence with two final stops.
“captured by a Kinect devise” ->
Device
The way references are made is not consistent. For example:
“In [111] an application”
“In [110] a robotic system capable”
In one section, and in the next section authors last names are used in complement:
“Kiourt et al. integrate artificial intelligence . . . [90]”
“Hayashi et al. introduced the term Personal Virtual Museum in [91].”
Another issue is that the paper does not motivate the work very well. The Introduction does not explain why the current work is necessary. What and who will benefit from this work? What is the scientific contribution? There are many other reviews focused on CH, how does the current work add to the existing body of knowledge? At moments, the Introduction seems a bit without focus when it mentions VR and AR when nothing thus far led the reader into those specific technologies.
I think that having a Related Work section would be helpful (or at least a section on the Introduction) to related the present work with previous work and explain how this one is different and adds something to the existing works.
Another issue is the lack of a clearly explained methodology. Sections 2 and beyond start presenting the results of the work without explaining or justifying how the survey was made. The Introduction says that “we analyze the technologies and the methodologies proposed in the last years in the context of cultural heritage”. What do authors mean by “last years”? In what data was the analysis based on? How was the data analysed? How did the authors get to the four pillars?
I also found it hard to understand the take-away of the results. At some points, the analysis seems very low-level, making it hard to understand the consequence for CH.
In other points, it seems that the authors have additional pre-conditions that were not conveyed to the reader. For example “Albeit it is favorable for localization of sensors in WSN, it is not readily available on majority of the user devices, as a consequence it is not suitable for indoor localization of users[81].” Why would it need to be on a user’s device? Museums already lend their own audio-guide devices to users, why not lend some other sort of device?
On the Multimodal Interaction section, I could not understand the structure of it. At one point it seems the authors are going to describe systems that use various individual modalities, starting with audio, but then the section goes on to RFID tags for positioning, vision for following paths, IoT, AR, etc. It is hard to understand any structure here.
In the User Understanding section it is not clear from the various examples what information constituted the user profile and how that info was leveraged in the CH site.
After reading section 6, I get the feeling that the four pillars that guided the presentation of the survey were devised before the survey and not a consequence of it. It might make more sense to write a paper about the four pillars perspective where each pillar is supported by the literature and where the vision is then instantiated in a specific compuational artefact that is subject to some sort of evaluation.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Authors proposed the new fruition modalities of cultural heritage sites with advanced data analysis and multimodal environment. This article seems to be review article. However, author mentioned that this is just article so authors need to confirm that. Authors showed two opinions of the artificial cognitive models and augmented reality device modeling. Literature search about the localization of indoor and localization technologies are very good because previous technology information about WiFi, WSN, UWB, etc are clearly summarized. Description about 4 aspect ( User Localization, Multimodal Interaction, User Understanding and Gamification) are in detail with some useful information about the technologies. HMD techniques are well shown such as see-through HMD and immersive HMD display. Therefore, the manuscript could be minor revision.
However, there are some broken grammar mistakes a lot in entire manuscript. Thus, authors need to request professional English service or ask native English colleagues. Authors need to use new MDPI journal format. Authors also need to check MDPI reference formats. Authors also need to add some references. Authors need to check the following comments as below.
1. Figure labels (Figures 1,2,and 3) are too small to be seen.
2. Authors need to mention how to categorize Table 1 references.
3. Authors need to summarize some important opinions in the conclusion sections because Abstract and Conclusion sections are similar.
4. Author need to add the reference (It is well known that the domain of Cultural Heritage demands to face different issues, such as the~)
5. Author need to add the reference (Among new facilities, Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and natural language~).
6. Author need to add the reference (For example, a specific type of equipment will be chosen to comply with the specific characteristics~).
7. Authors need to mention why 4 main aspects are selected (User Localization, Multimodal Interaction, User Understanding and Gamification). Please describe that in detail.
8. Author need to add the reference ((In addition, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach based on connection of end-to-end~).
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have made an effort to address all comments, which I applaud.
The revised version is substantially clearer.
I think that the explanations provided by section 7 should come earlier in the paper so that readers fully understand why the survey was narrowed down and what is the context of the work. Given that section 7 provides a list of the surveyed papers, it could also serve as summary for the following sections that review each pillar.
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for his valuable comments. We have highlighted in red the changes we made. We have moved the explanations from section 7 to section 2. As suggested by the reviewer, we also moved back Table 1 to summarize the subsequent sections. We consequently changed the paper's structure within the introduction to be consistent with the changes we made. Finally, we modified the text of section 7 slightly to make it self-consistent after moving much of the text into section two. Furthermore, we checked the paper for the English language more in-depth.
