Tourism Guide Application for Heritage Sites in Surabaya Based on Augmented Reality and GPS Gamification

Abstract

One of the most important revenue streams for the nation's economy and development is tourism. The COVID-19 pandemic is, however, causing a reduction in tourism in Indonesia; Surabaya, the country's second-largest city, has seen a drop in visitors from 6.5 million to 500 thousand. To solve this problem, an innovation is required to boost the number of visitors to Indonesia's heritage sites who use contemporary technology, specifically smartphone with interactive media (with AR and GPS for instance). The author will develop an app that, depending on the user's location, will let them visit several Surabaya heritage sites and provide them with comprehensive details and instructions. Indonesia can stimulate its economy and return visitors to its heritage sites by employing this interactive gamification apps. However, on the examination to the user, we found a good implementation in detecting and measuring the nearest destination to the current user position, and how to parse into google map and guiding the destination to that heritage site. But we have some distraction when pointing the apps to the Augmented Reality (AR) marker on the site, since various historical places have various lighting, some devices are unable to take a clear picture of the marker due to its lack of lighting and abnormal size or form. Thus, it will be effective when the user points his smartphone camera to the AR marker, he/she supposed to use the smartphone lighting as well.