Augmented Reality in Points of Interest

Description of the service : The use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology supports the tourists
experience of the stroll in the city. By means of the AR application running on the tourist smartphone,
along the way, he will get direct access to information on a specific monument in the preferred language,
enhancing the serendipity effect of the tourist visit. Video stream produced by the smartphone camera
will be presented to the users in the AR application, augmenting the live feed of the camera with virtual
objects (mainly digital content, video, texts, photos) of the POIs, based on the current position of the
device, in order to create an augmented view. For each POI it will be provided a description of the place
or reference image to be used in the AR view and the type of content (3d model, image, videos, audio,
etc.) to be superimposed. The content itself is not part of the Point Of Interest but will link to the content
instead. Users can also define their own preferences (language, touristic places to visit, monuments, etc.)
and have a better experience visiting the city rather than using traditional standalone applications. The
use of tags (either RFID/NFC tags or QR codes) will provide information that is not included in the POI
itself. Moreover, the system will have special features where citizens can search cultural and leisure
events based in geolocation or look for nearby services and focused in municipal equipment provided by
City Council databases. Furthermore, triggers can be defined for each POI in order to trigger specific
actions (play an audio clip, advertise events and more), when a visitor is in the nearby area. In a small
scale, the use of tags provides an opportunity to distribute information in the urban environment as
location based information. In a larger scale, the tags can be coupled with more advanced services such
as feedback from the citizens to the city council. Furthermore, placing tags on certain shops in the city
provides new opportunities for shops to build or strengthen customer relationships, as they can explore
the correlation between physical presence and the web.

On the other hand, users can get specific information about the shop, for instance, opening hours,
contact details, special offers, accessibility to the shop, etc. Apart from that, movement patterns of the
users can be recorded in an anonymous way. It will provide third party developers the possibility to
enrich their application and services, based on the user experience within the city. For the municipality,
observations sent by the AR applications will allow the collection of information about how many people
visit the different POI, or at least is in the nearby areas, origin from that people, seasonality, etc. Based
on this information, they can improve the touristic offer of the city, adapting the cultural events and
activities during each season. Furthermore, users will have the possibility of writing feedback about the
POI, either by writing a small text or simply with a like button as Facebook.

Technical Characteristics : Participatory Sensing, Social Networks, AutoID (RFID, NFC,

QRCodes), Context Awareness
Societal Challenges Addressed : Sustainable Development, Demographics Changes