Fast Authoring for Mobile Gamebased City Tours

Tourists want to tell other people about their journeys and adventures. This is often done via social networks and digital photos. But what if one could tell other people about a great tour by sharing the tour itself with others than just photos or short messages?. In this paper, we present an intuitive authoring tool for gamebased city tours and a rendering app for these tours on iOS. This way, complex tours can be authored and shared easily with others. These tours allow tourists to explore new interesting sites in an exciting way: Tourists are lead from station to station. On each station, something interesting happens: A short question has to be answered or interesting details in the surrounding is shown. This is very similar to geocaching, a worldwide GPS stash hunt. On each station, images and questions can be presented to the tourists. This leads to knowledge transfer: Tourists get to know new facts about the locations they are visiting. In our previous work, we showed that such tours can indeed transfer knowledge [1]. We evaluated the authoring tool to find out if it is possible to author complex touristic tours with it. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the programme committee of the 2013 International Conference on Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education.