Flaneur: Augmented exploration of the architectural urbanscape

Abstract

The recent developments in the area of mobile technologies have enabled the diffusion of augmented reality. This article explores new possibilities for leveraging the power of augmented reality, further to its typical use as a means for projecting virtual content over physical objects. That is, it investigates the potential of augmented reality as a tool for participatory content creation and sharing. In order to demonstrate this idea, we have developed Flaneur, a mobile augmented reality application which invites users to wander around a city to discover and highlight its architectural assets. Flaneur serves both as an architectural heritage guide and as a crowdsourcing platform. In particular, further to consuming content edited by administrators, users are enabled to share their knowledge and experiences about heritage buildings through uploading textual and graphical annotation, which is later delivered to peer users as augmented context. The platform allows the documentation of architecture-relevant content either for whole building blocks or even for specific architectural and decorative elements. Moreover, it enables the precise placement and arrangement of digital content over the physical asset to be augmented. Flaneur has been evaluated though field trials, which provided valuable insights as regards the effectiveness, utility and restrictions of the application.