Augmented reality in Tourism

AR (Augmented reality) is the integration of digital information with the user's environment in real time. Unlike virtual reality, which creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it. AR has become a new buzz word. Actually, this technology, which allows combining seamlessly physical world and virtual information, is widely under-utilized in the field of Tourism.

There are some applications have already use AR technology to create the new experience to tourist. The Mobile Art Lab in Japan had developed a new iPhone App, iButterfly, that lets you catch virtual butterflies and turn them in for valuable offers. Ibutterfly is an augmented reality program, it takes the video feed from your phone's camera and superimposes virtual images - in this case butterflies. Users can travel all around Japan and see a wide variety of 'butterfly species', including some that look like pop celebrities or pieces of food.

Most recently, interactive digital storytelling techniques have been applied to museum settings to increase their educational potential to visitors. For example, the Digital Binocular Station (DBS) makes the static contents of a museum come to life, leading to an interactive, dynamic and interesting adventure, which increases visitor retention time, and return visits. AR technology on museum provides really positive effect on visitors and tourists, which can involve them in the exhibits of museum, instead of looking around the museum. It’s like the visitors earn a free guide to get the information and experience.

Amongst the many AR smartphone applications, AR browsers enjoy the biggest popularity. Many of them claim to have tourism related functionalities. An AR browser suited for the needs of tourism enriches the real-world with interactive virtual information that allows visitors to unfamiliar locations to identify the most important and interesting points of interest and learn more about their surroundings. Probably the most successful and interesting example is the stand-alone smartphone application Yelp, which added AR view to provide an augmented view to tourists.

 AR can represent the history. Except the convenience and interests that AR techonology has bring to visitors, in fact, it also can create and enhance  reproduction of the historical scene.For example,for visiting the most famous Roman Colosseum，tourists queue up for long time and spend lots of money, but they can only see the ruins.Now with AR high-tech, visitors can "pass through" to the ancient city of Rome 2,000 years ago.Tourists can see the perfect repairation of Colosseum, the fight between slave and lion ,even the moment that the heroic slave struggling to escape the lion attack. History is not only described in books, but a real scene happening around.

Using the new technologies, media to  develop more wisdom tourism has increasingly become hot in tourism industry.The usageof  Smart AR has changing the way of travel hugely .Of course, There are lots of challenges to overcome, the application of a lack of mass support ,but It’s sure that the value of AR in tourism is limitless .AR open a new tourism world to us.

Source:

http://195.130.87.21:8080/dspace/bitstream/123456789/653/1/Enhancing%20cultural%20tourism%20experiences%20with%20augmented%20reality%20technologies.pdf

http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/38051/InTech-Enhancing_the_tourism_experience_through_mobile_augmented_reality_challenges_and_prospects.pdf
http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/20219/1/eRTR_SI_V10i2_Yovcheva_Buhalis_Gatzidis_63-66

ByYuanyuan WuJingyao Zhu