Opening Doors to History: Improving the Self-Guided Tour Experience at the Grabser Mühlbach

The history and community of Grabs, Switzerland were largely shaped by the millstream that flows through the small town. The Grabser Mühlbach association has strived to preserve the historical and communal significance of the mills through its museum. The self-guided tour of the privately owned mills could be improved to provide more access of information for visitors. The project investigated and developed features, such as interactive maps, links to videos of the mill interiors and personal stories of the mills, and a model website with an easily usable layout, that could enhance information accessibility. These deliverables and more, recorded in the form of a manual, will help the Grabser Mühlbach association share history with future generations

Exploring the past with Google Cardboard

Combining digital reconstruction with mobile technologies has the potential of enriching visitors experience to historic sites. Through designing a mobile App with Google Cardboard it is possible to use technology already in peoples' pockets to provide immersive on-site exploration of historic sites. This paper looks at our experience in developing such a mobile App which acts as a digital guided tour of the remains of St Andrews Cathedral. The App brings together traditional media such as audio, images, panoramas, 3D video and 4π Steradian (or 360°) video with a mobile smartphone and Google Cardboard to provide a tour of one of Scotland's most important historic sites. The mobile App is available from both Google Play and iTunes, providing direct delivery to a potential audience of millions. It complements the location-aware mediaeval St Andrews App, which provides a guided tour to the town of St Andrews as a whole. In the absence of Google Cardboard the App is still useful providing both visual content and audio commentary on this historic monument.Postprin

Performing Whale-Watching in Juneau, Alaska

Nature-based tourism activities provide special contexts for human-wildlife interaction. In Juneau, Alaska, summertime tourists seek encounters with humpback whales, hundreds of which feed seasonally in Southeast Alaska’s coastal waterways. Tourists support a thriving whale-watching industry in the region. Voices in nature-based tourism studies, departing from prior rigid conceptualizations of tourism, have identified the need to investigate activities using innovative frameworks to address the tourism experience as an ongoing and fluidly constructed phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to construct a new understanding of nature-based tourism using a performance metaphor. The flexibility provided in a metaphorical approach allows for a return to the geographical basis of space in both tangible and intangible forms. A set of in-depth interviews with Juneau whale-watching customers and industry professionals reveal how space is portrayed, navigated, and experienced during whale-watching. Here these elements appear as performative components of script, stage, and action. The whale-watching performance involves a lively and often awe-inspiring stage upon which human and non-human actors interact. Results uncover how such a production in wild spaces may produce an immersive wildlife experience

A Framework for Constructing and Evaluating the Role of MR as a Holographic Virtual Guide in Museums

Mixed reality (MR) is a cutting-edge technology at the forefront of many new applications in the tourism and cultural heritage sector. This study aims to reshape the museum experience by creating a highly engaging and immersive museum experience for visitors combing real-time visual, audio information and computer-generated images with museum artefacts and customer displays. This research introduces a theoretical framework that assesses the potential of MR guidance system in usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment, interactivity, touring and future applications. The evaluation introduces the MuseumEye MR application in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo using mixed method surveys and a sample of 171 participants. The results of the questionnaire highlighted the importance of the mediating the role of the tour guide in enhancing the relationship between perceived usefulness, ease of use, multimedia, UI design, interactivity and the intention of use. Furthermore, the results of this study revealed the potential future use of MR in museums and ensured sustainability and engagement past the traditional visitor museum experience, which heightens the economic state of museums and cultural heritage sectors