Mobile location-based augmented reality applications for urban tourism storytelling

Abstract

Creating a mobile urban tourism storytelling application presents several interactivity challenges on how to convey an engaging multimedia experience on-site. This article describes a methodology for fast prototyping of a multimedia mobile applications dedicated to urban tourism storytelling. The application can be a game that takes advantage of several locationbased technologies, freely available geo-referenced media, and augmented reality for immersive gameplay. The goal is to create serious games for tourism that follow a main narrative but where the story can automatically adapt itself to the current location of the player, assimilate possible detours and allow posterior out-of-location playback. Adaptable stories can use dynamic information from map sources such as points of interest (POI), elevation or virtual buildings. The main focus is for these locationbased storytelling games to create more engagement between the tourists and the urban environment. To explore this concept, an application was designed for the city of Porto: Unlocking Porto. This location-based game with a central, yet adaptable, story engages the player into the main sights following an augmented reality path while playing small games. The article discusses and presents solutions for media acquisition, interactive storytelling, game-design interface and multi-disciplinary coordination for mobile app development.

Leveraging Transmedia storytelling to engage tourists in the understanding of the destination’s local heritage

“…The positive involvement and care for the protagonist of the fiction brought the audience closer to the island heritage, values and local culture. In resonance with [21,52], the audience involvement with the main character was quite effective highlighting values and issues important for the local community at the time of the fiction, as well as at the present day, such issue being highlighted by the seven themes of the TS (Natural disasters, Laurisiva Medicinal Plants, Madeira's Fauna, Exotic Species, Hydrological Balance and Macaronesia Forests).…”

“…Moreover, Weber [74] promotes storytelling as an essential element for experience design and a method to communicate the city experience to a tourist. The use of a story or of a character increases the audience connection and engagement, and it can help in meaning-making and mediation of touristic sites or events [52].…”

Marqur - A Social Platform for Location-based Content Aggregation and Discussion

“…Rui Nobrega et al [1] stated that location-based storytelling is a powerful tool for tourism destinations to draw people in and make them understand the places they visit in a more interactive way than just presenting bare facts. The demand for these AR gamming apps are increasing and they require new approaches such as geo-location, to gather points of interest (POI) and mining social networks, to get collaborative feedback from other tourists or visitors.…”

Comparative study of user experience on mobile pedestrian navigation between digital map interface and location-based augmented reality

“…Recent improvements in the capabilities of smartphones are making the location-based augmented reality (AR) services a reality. Along with this trend, various concepts and prototypes have been proposed, focusing on basic implementation issues of mobile applications like tourism [4][5][6], health [7][8][9] and education [10][11][12][13]. Location-based AR provides a novel interface to smoothly link the physical location coordinate with data processing environments that make a user can see digital POI (Point of Interest) annotation of the particular landmark in the real environment.…”