Audio augmented reality in public transport for exploring tourist sites

Abstract

Audio augmented reality (AR) has a long research tradition in the tourism industry. Audio AR tour guides for urban environments provide location-based, auditory information about nearby sights, minimising distractions from interacting with mobile devices and enabling users to focus on their new surroundings. In this work, we present the design, development, and usability evaluation of AudioTransit, an audio AR tour guide using the public transport network for exploring urban tourist sites with which we investigate the design and implementation of audio AR systems in tourism. Overall, the study indicates very good usability and an altogether positive acceptance of the concept of audio AR in public transport for tourism purposes.

PassengXR: A Low Cost Platform for Any-Car, Multi-User, Motion-Based Passenger XR Experiences

“…As this fusion algorithm is a black box, we are unable to do any significant corrections to the tracking. Instead, our focus is on supporting 3DoF tracking in-car, and in particular identifying headsets that a) can be forced into 3DoF tracking by practitioners and b) whose 3DoF tracking implementation operates reliably in-car 3 . Given a vehicle mounted IMU, it should be straightforward to zero the headset tracking to the IMU, such that the IMU tracks the orientation of the vehicle, and the headset tracks the combined orientation of vehicle and head movementthe basis for vehicle-locked content.…”

“…Location-based experiences (LBEs) are a key component of many envisaged passenger XR scenarios, for example augmented tourism [3], location-based gaming [48] etc. To enact an LBE, we need to know where in the world the vehicle is over time, and in Passen-gXR this is established using GNSS positioning.…”

Survey: Using Augmented Reality to Improve Learning Motivation in Cultural Heritage Studies

“…In general, AR allows users to have better experiences in the services offered, since it allows access to relevant information, and thus, helps improve participants' knowledge about different places they can visit [38][39][40][41]. For instance, an application called AudioNear [39] uses an AR system with audio on public transport and generates information about a monument or interesting place based on the user's position.…”

“…In addition, AR improves the human perception of [35] and interaction with the real world, and it could be applied to human senses such as hearing, taste, smell, touch, and vision [11,12] to improve on them or even replace them [12]. Meanwhile, the article by Bolestis [40] mentions that using audio AR reduces any distraction mobile devices can cause because the user, is focused on the audio content. They describe an application called AudioTransit, which is an AR audio tour guide used on public transport to provide commuters/users with free information about cultural points of interest they may be passing.…”

Prediction and Controlling of Auditory Perception in Augmented Environments. A Loudness-Based Dynamic Mixing Technique

“…To achieve the desired immersion, an ARA headset and binaural rendering technique [2,3] are employed. Due to this rather simplistic and portable two-channel realization, ARA is currently utilized in a wide range of applications, including museum tours [4], audio games [5][6][7][8], impaired people aids [9,10], navigation [11,12], tourism [13,14], and even sound art [15].…”