Interactive design using non-touch technologies for group trip

Abstract

With the explosion of smartphone popularity in recent years, people are familiar with mobile tourism guides. Users often spend much time to look for travel information on the Internet without user interaction on relevant websites. Generally, the tour guides lead tourists to interact with travel attractions in a group trip. This study applies an interactive model to traveling while tourists join a travel group with a tour guide. The two mobile APPs with non-touch techniques are implemented based on the model in order to enhance the interactive behavior between tourists, the tour guide and travel sight visited. Applications include the following features: (i) scanning QR codes through a camera to obtain the information of travel attractions; (ii) sensing NFC tags to obtain travel information; (iii) sharing social data between tourists using NFC technology; and finally (iv) gathering rapidly the comments from a large number of tourists using NFC technology. Consequently, the model would not only reduce any upcoming difficulties and the time to gather tour information for tourists, but also improves people's social behavior during traveling. Using such applications, the travel information that users have obtained is automatically stored in the local repository of smartphones, so that users can access the same information anytime in the future even without access to the Internet. In addition, two proposed applications are implemented for tourist and the tour guide on Android platform based on interactive model.