Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

About This Boo:

As short trips to urban destinations have been increasing in popularity (Gospodini 2004), maintaining the inflow of tourists especially for heritage sites has become a challenge for a number of destinations. In alignment with technological developments, the implementation of ICTs in the tourism industry was argued to support the sustainability of urban heritage sites and increase their competitiveness in the global market. As a result, it is crucial to investigate how modern technology can be implemented meaningfully to enhance the tourist experience. Augmented Reality (AR) has become an area of interest for tourism, as it is able to overlay digital information in the immediate environment. This makes it an ideal tool to provide information in unknown locations if it can be developed meaningfully. Although research and public interest in AR for wearable devices has increased significantly (Siluk 2015), it is crucial to clearly understand requirements for current mobile AR-ready handsets before investigating forthcoming technology. While a number of studies to implement AR in tourism have been conducted, initial research has largely focused on functionalities (Fritz et al. 2005; Reitmayr and Schmalstieg 2003), while recent studies are shifting towards enhancing the tourist experience (Jung et al. 2015; Leue et al. 2015). Nonetheless, studies exploring requirements of AR applications from a tourist perspective are still limited. Therefore, this study will investigate tourist requirements for mobile AR tourism applications in the context of urban heritage tourism to design beneficial applications for tourists and encourage repeated use.