Over the last two decades, there have been tremendous advances in mobile technologies, which have increased the interest in studying and developing mobile augmented reality systems, especially in the field of Cultural Heritage. Nowadays, people rely even more on smartphones, for example, when visiting a new city to search for information about monuments and landmarks, and the visitor expects precise and tailored information to his needs.
Therefore, researchers started to investigate innovative approaches for presenting and suggesting digital content related to cultural and historical places around the city, incorporating contextual information about the visitor and his needs. This document presents a novel mobile augmented reality application, NearHeritage, that was developed within the scope of the master's thesis on Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University (FEUP), in collaboration with INESC TEC.
The research carried out was focused on the importance of utilising modern technologies to assist the visitors in finding and exploring Cultural Heritage. In this way, it is provided not only the nearby points-of-interest of a city but also detailed information about each POI. The solution presented uses built-in sensors and hardware of Android devices and takes advantage of various APIs (Foursquare API, Google Maps API and IntelContextSensing) to retrieve information about the landmarks and the visitor context. Also, these are crucial hardware components for implementing the full potential of augmented reality tools to create innovative contents that increase the overall user experience. All the experiments were conducted in Porto, Portugal, and the final results showcase that the concept of a MAR application can improve the user experience in discovering and learning more about Cultural Heritage around the world, creating an interactive, enjoyable and unforgettable adventure
