A Mobile Framework for Tourist Guides

Open-air heritage sites have started making use of different types of tourist guides in order to attract a larger number of visitors as well as educate them in a more challenging manner. However, most of them are still using static audiovisual guides which usually require input from visitors to operate. On the contrary, location-based heritage guides offer a number of advantages over traditional tourist guides ranging from advanced visualisation to intuitive interaction. This paper, presents a novel multimodal mobile framework for tourist guides which can be used in any open-air heritage exhibition. The proposed mobile system allows tourists to switch between three different presentation guides including map, virtual and augmented reality. Localisation of the visitors is established based on position and orientation sensors which are integrated on light-weight handheld devices. To illustrate some of the capabilities of the mobile system two case-studies are presented. Categories: Mobile Guides, Location-based Services, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Interactive Environments.