The Impact of Mobile Augmented Reality on the Purchase Intention of Intangible Cultural Heritage Handicrafts

Faced with decreasing demand for traditional handicraft products and the difficulty of finding inheritors, there is an urgent need to prevent the unfortunate loss of such valuable traditional handicraft skills. The use of mobile augmented reality technology has huge potential to stimulate the purchase intentions of cultural heritage handicrafts by both domestic and overseas tourists, but such a relationship is largely unexplored. This paper uses structural equation modeling and draws on a sample of 378 Chinese to investigate the different aspects of AR technology’s impact in terms of breadth of vividness, information quality, and interactivity on handicraft purchase intention mediated through cultural uniqueness and value co-creation. Based on the stimulus-organism-response theory, the results support all the proposed hypotheses, with the exception of the relationship between information quality and cultural uniqueness. The level of interactivity has the largest and most significant impact on value co-creation and cultural uniqueness. The theoretical and practical implications were discussed, and future research recommendations were provided.