Enhancing cultural tourism by a mixed reality application for outdoor navigation and information browsing using immersive devices

In this paper a mixed reality application is introduced; this application runs on Microsoft Hololens and has been designed to provide information on a city scale. The application was developed to provide information about historical buildings, thus supporting cultural outdoor tourism. The huge amount of multimedia data stored in the archives of the Italian public broadcaster RAI, is used to enrich the user experience. A remote application of image and video analysis receives an image flow by the user and identifies known objects framed in the images. The user can select the object (monument/building/artwork) for which augmented contents have to be displayed (video, text audio); the user can interact with these contents by a set of defined gestures. Moreover, if the object of interest is detected and tracked by the mixed reality application, also 3D contents can be overlapped and aligned with the real world

Mobile augmented reality tourism application framework

One of the field that in fast growing is the tourism industry. Developing mobile tourism application requires a thorough study on requirements. This research discussed the conception, inception and implementation of the framework for mobile augmented reality tourism application. Thus, the objective of this study to analyse and construct requirement needed for a mobile augmented reality tourism application framework and to apply the framework in product development. The framework consists of requirements pyramid model and components of the user, technical and system design requirements which are dependent on each other. The framework adopts user-centered design approach by refining user input in user requirements all the way to product development. The questionnaire is distributed to 105 respondent to find out whether the software requirement component proposed are according to their needs and expectation. Descriptive and factor analysis were used to analyse the data. Based on the result, the component proposed have a high-reliability index, indicating that the components are acceptable. The findings provide a foundation into constructing mobile augmented reality tourism application framework and facilitate the software development. This research hopes to contribute to the field of software requirements and able to give guidance to other researchers who are interested in the field of mobile augmented reality tourism application