A Decade of Extended Reality in Cultural Heritage (2015-2025): A Systematic Literature Review

Cultural Heritage (CH) plays a crucial role in shaping human identity and transmitting knowledge across generations. Over the past decade, immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality and Extended Reality (XR) have increasingly been adopted to enhance cultural experiences and support the preservation and communication of heritage. However, while many XR applications have been proposed in this field, the literature often emphasizes the technological novelty and the "wow experience" of immersive experiences rather than systematically evaluating their effectiveness from a user-centered perspective. It remains unclear to what extent evaluation practices address knowledge transfer and learning outcomes. To investigate this aspect, this paper presents a systematic literature review of XR applications in CH published between 2015 and 2025. A total of 84 peer-reviewed studies were selected from five major academic databases and analyzed to investigate technological trends, application domains, and user evaluation practices across four areas: Museums and Exhibitions, Conservation and Reconstruction, Tourism and Exploration, and Intangible Cultural Heritage. The review provides an evidence based map of how XR applications for CH are currently validated as user-facing systems. Results show that Virtual Reality is the dominant technology, laboratory-based evaluations remain prevalent, and many applications are not tested in real heritage contexts. Evaluation practices are fragmented: usability, user experience, and presence are frequently assessed, whereas only 23 of 84 studies explicitly evaluate knowledge transfer and only 3 studies assess knowledge retention through delayed measures. These findings provide empirical evidence of current evaluation practices and support the need for more user-centered validation protocols in XR-CH research.