Archeoguide: An Augmented Reality Guide for Archaeological Sites

computers to archaeology and cultural heritage either as tools for promoting scientific work or as electronic aids providing users with information. During the past decade, CD-ROMs and Web sites have provided public access to virtual museums, archaeological sites, and works of art. Audio CD guides installed in cultural heritage sites let visitors participate in prerecorded audio tours, and information kiosks provide interactive historical, artistic, and other information. The latest developments include portable devices capable of providing guided tours with audiovisual information and limited interaction. Most of these tools, however, lack intelligence, user friendliness, and the ability to provide accurate navigation. Each solves only part of the interactive visualization problem and fails to integrate many features users might expect such as guidance and navigation information, information personalization, access to objects stored at remote locations, life animation, and so on. We developed Archeoguide, short for Augmented Reality-Based Cultural Heritage On-Site Guide, to bridge the gap between recreation, education, and scientific research. This article shows how a welldesigned mobile system can provide a personalized electronic guide to outdoor archaeological sites, help users navigate and make the most of their visit, and enable the collection, exploitation, and updating of archaeological data on any given site. The system exploits recent advances in mobile computing, augmented reality, 3D visualization, networking, and archiving to present users with on-site and online tours of the physical site according to their profile and behavior during the tour.