Abstract
Nowadays, Brazil has an expected growth in the tourism sector due to the FIFA World Cup (which had a huge success) and the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. However, there is a lack of tourism applications for Brazil, such as Electronic Tourism Guides (ETGs) for mobile devices. The existence of ETGs that takes into account real world environment is still very rare. By taking into account this scenario, this article presents a ubiquitous tourism model based on augmented reality. The proposed architecture, which is called UbitourAR, takes into account the context awareness focusing on localization-based services allied with user profile and restrictions. This article describes the development of UbitourAR enabling users to interact with the real world environment using augmented reality when visiting a place or point of interest (POI). In order to evaluate the model we had taken two approaches. Firstly, we evaluated the ontology proposed using scenarios. Secondly, we evaluated the usability in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction. For doing that, we developed a mobile application for the Caminhos de Pedra itinerary, in Bento Goncalves, Brazil. The proposed model extends the previous work of Ubitour by adding augmented reality. The results of the tests showed a user acceptance higher than 80%, which encourages the research in augmented reality allied with ubiquitous tourism. Keywords: augmented reality, Web Semantics, ubiquitous tourism, ubiquitous computing, mobile computing.
Highlights
With the expected tourism growth in Brazil, especially because the recently realized FIFA World Cup 2014, and the forthcoming Olympics, which will be held in 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, there is a need for applications that support this increase
Mobile devices applications can act as a help for searching information about a point of interest (POI), by detecting contextual data about the place, such as the specific pinpoint of the user, and display information that might positively impact on their tourist experience when visiting a place
This work considers the lack of exploring augmented reality and other ubiquitous computing concepts to aid the process of doing tourism in Brazil
Summary
With the expected tourism growth in Brazil, especially because the recently realized FIFA World Cup 2014, and the forthcoming Olympics, which will be held in 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, there is a need for applications that support this increase. UbitourAR is based on ontologies to optimize the user tourism experience in a region and generate the information needed This information is presented using augmented reality. The RAframework class works as an singleton and is called inside the states, in order to provide basic functionalities to developers, such as build routes, create POIs, get angles values and load videos to screen. The last class introduced in this work is the RAViewControl class, which is controlled by the augmented reality component and inherits the functionalities of the UIImagePicker, for camera usage, LocationManager for work with localization contexts, and the NGLViewdelegates (from Nineveh GL) This class triggers events when the mobile device changes the directions or positions.
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