TouristicAR: A Smart Glass Augmented Reality Application for UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Malaysia.

Abstract

Modern day technologies including wearable devices such as smart glasses have changed the way people interact with their surroundings. Such developments have resulted in the increased popularity of Augmented Reality (AR) applications to project context-aware information on objects or users’ immediate surroundings. In order to enhance the overall tourism experience, a number of recent works have highlighted the opportunities for using outdoor AR or navigation-based AR systems. Due to the development of context-aware AR, tourists using such technology can acquire valuable knowledge and experience. Recent context-aware AR research lack empirical studies and works that integrate dimensions which are specific to cultural heritage tourism and smart glass specific context. This work presents the mapping of requirements identified during the affinity mapping and focuses group experiments into a smart glass-based AR application called “TouristicAR” to identifying the factors of user acceptance and specific tourist requirements. This works highlights the technical requirement, design conceptualisation, smart glass User Interface (UI) design and smart glass application development using a Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology. The smart glass AR application is developed in the context of cultural heritage tourism and provides context-aware and visually appealing tourism contents to the visitors at the UNESCO World Heritage sites in Malaysia.