A MOBILE PLATFORM FOR LOCATION-BASED SERVICE APPLICATIONS USING AUGMENTED REALITY: ONLINE MAP, TRACKING AND NAVIGATION ON GOOGLE ANDROID SMARTPHONE DEVICE (TOC, Abstract, Chapter 1 and Reference only)

This project paper is about Augmented Reality (AR) using location-based visualization and implementation on the smartphone devices. That is partly because smartphone comes packed with built-in sensors have grown and become popular over the years. This will explore the interactive and interaction Location Based Services that AR allows on Android devices. The use of mobile applications and advancement in mobile technology such as Global Positioning System (GPS), compass and accelerometer sensors are able to identify and determine the location and orientation of the device, location-based applications with augmented reality views are possible. AR combines the real world with virtual, the integration of information in the user's environment in real time, the user interaction techniques of representing rich, intuitive information data of the real world. The AR application which typically takes the image of the integrated camera, positioning location as a representation of the real world and project objects on top of this image to create the AR view. The research was initiated by exploring and reviewing literature related domain and existing AR application available on Android devices. There are a number of AR applications available and the rapid development of Android smartphone devices has provided an improved platform for the application of mobile AR technologies. Developing application will help the researcher explore the topic while going through this technology. The aim of this study is to develop a combination of location-based information and AR features by blending both visual, map-based and nonmap based elements like live projection of a nearby landmark on camera preview on mobile devices, utilizing free and open source software development tools. In the context of this paper a prototype application, based on the Android platform and Mixare engine library is developed. This paper showed the initial thoughts on this application and overall process that leads to the final system development. This report describes MyARTGuide, a prototype application of augmented reality designed to be run over Android based smartphone. The user can now look through their phone as if taking a picture to look at the augmented world which leads to a better user experience. MyARTGuide is developed for experiment, simulation and to test the AR functionality of these project objectives is not a fully functional product. Thus, there are still more areas that can be improved and new features can be added. With the use of AR and Andorid technology it is possible to spread the experience which will be shown in this report. (ABSTRACT BY AUTHOR

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology

User-centred design of smartphone augmented reality in urban tourism context.

Exposure to new and unfamiliar environments is a necessary part of nearly everyone’s life. Effective communication of location-based information through various locationbased service interfaces (LBSIs) became a key concern for cartographers, geographers, human-computer interaction (HCI) and professional designers alike. Much attention is directed towards Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces. Smartphone AR browsers deliver information about physical objects through spatially registered virtual annotations and can function as an interface to (geo)spatial and attribute data. Such applications have considerable potential for tourism. Recently, the number of studies discussing the optimal placement and layout of AR content increased. Results, however, do not scale well to the domain of urban tourism, because: 1) in any urban destination, many objects can be augmented with information; 2) each object can be a source of a substantial amount of information; 3) the incoming video feed is visually heterogeneous and complex; 4) the target user group is in an unfamiliar environment; 5) tourists have different information needs from urban residents. Adopting a User-Centred Design (UCD) approach, the main aim of this research project was to make a theoretical contribution to design knowledge relevant to effective support for (geo)spatial knowledge acquisition in unfamiliar urban environments. The research activities were divided in four (iterative) stages: (1) theoretical, (2) requirements analysis, (3) design and (4) evaluation. After critical analysis of existing literature on design of AR, the theoretical stage involved development of a theoretical user-centred design framework, capturing current knowledge in several relevant disciplines. In the second stage, user requirements gathering was carried out through a field quasi experiment where tourists were asked to use AR browsers in an unfamiliar for them environment. Qualitative and quantitative data were used to identify key relationships, extend the user-centred design framework and generate hypotheses about effective and efficient design. In the third stage, several design alternatives were developed and used to test the hypotheses through a laboratory-based quantitative study with 90 users. The results indicate that information acquisition through AR browsers is more effective and efficient if at least one element within the AR annotation matches the perceived visual characteristics or inferred non-visual attributes of target physical objects. Finally, in order to ensure that all major constructs and relationships are identified, qualitative evaluation of AR annotations was carried out by HCI and GIS domain-expert users in an unfamiliar urban tourism context. The results show that effective information acquisition in urban tourism context will depend on the visual design and delivered content through AR annotations for both visible and non-visible points of interest. All results were later positioned within existing theory in order to develop a final conceptual user-centred design framework that shifts the perspective towards a more thorough understanding of the overall design space for mobile AR interfaces. The dissertation has theoretical, methodological and practical implications. The main theoretical contribution of this thesis is to Information Systems Design Theory. The developed framework provides knowledge regarding the design of mobile AR. It can be used for hypotheses generation and further empirical evaluations of AR interfaces that facilitate knowledge acquisition in different types of environments and for different user groups. From a methodological point of view, the described userbased studies showcase how a UCD approach could be applied to design and evaluation of novel smartphone interfaces within the travel and tourism domain. Within industry the proposed framework could be used as a frame of reference by designers and developers who are not familiar with knowledge acquisition in urban environments and/or mobile AR interfaces