Last month, I presented an article with title ‘A Mobile Framework for Tourist Guides’ to the workshop on Virtual Museums, which was held in conjunction with the VAST 2007 conference. This article, presents how the LOCUS multimodal mobile framework can be used for tourist guides which can be any open-air heritage exhibition. The main objective of the multimodal heritage system is to provide advanced LBS to mobile users delivered through a web-browser interface. The mobile system allows tourists to switch between three different presentation guides including map, virtual and augmented reality. Localisation of the visitors is established based on position and orientation sensors which are integrated on light-weight handheld devices. To illustrate some of the capabilities of the mobile guide two case-studies were presented: one for the national Swiss park while the second was developed for City University.
Using the City University mobile guide, pedestrians can navigate intuitively within the real environment using both position and orientation information on a mobile virtual environment. Additional functionality such as dynamic switching of camera viewpoint from the pedestrian view to a birds-eye view can be accessed from the menu buttons. Another important aspect of the guide is that the digital compass can be also used as a virtual pointer to provide useful information about the surroundings such as ‘what is the name of the building?’ or ‘how far it is located from me?’ etc. Routing tools are developed to provide advanced navigational assistance to mobile users based upon the experience of previous users, and so may suggest different routes depending on whether the journey is to be taken.
A draft version of the paper can be downloaded from here.
A draft version of the paper can be downloaded from here.