State of the art analysis - Jashar

Since the rest of the group mainly focused on technology and services that were already accessible to the broad public, I decided to see if I could find out what the future may hold - more specifically in terms of augmented reality for tourism. I chose to set the bar on the level of technologies that we could juse in, such as pointing your smartphone camera at something and getting your reality augmented with more information, and perhaps also something along the idea with Google Glass, but nothing more futuristic than that. I found the eTourismLab at Bournemouth University to have a prominent presence in this area, and my analysis is based on their currently published research, as well as some proofs of concept that are available to the public, but not yet sufficiently useful for the mass market.

In general, social media has had a huge impact on travel and tourism. Over half of the participants in one study reported that they had altered their travel plans after gathering information from fellow travellers who had shared their experiences online. However, most of the planning was done in the preparation phase, while the focus shifted more to documenting and sharing with friends and family once the journey had started. There is a strong motivation among travellers to share their experiences, providing plenty of data to work with. Essentially, if a person has decided to travel from any A to any B, it is very likely that the effort of browsing through everything that is in between will be overwhelming. This is where the augmented reality (AR) technology becomes very interesting - it can allow you to get the info you need as you go along. This allows for improvising and discovering things that few others have seen, which are strong positive factors for most travellers. But what is the current state for AR for tourists?

When travelling, there are many questions that may go unanswered - "Where is the nearest vegan friendly restaurant based on where I'm standing?", "What does this sign say?" or "What is the history of that building?”. To some extent, smartphones can help in researching this at the spot, through web searching and reading Wikipedia articles. However, because of both technological and monetary barriers, the ability to do so has mostly been reserved for locals, leaving the tourists hoping that their pre-travel research and friendly strangers will solve any issues. Also, smartphone performance has been an issue in the past, limiting the possibilities to render information in real time. 

Currently, the issues with unreasonably high data charges abroad are being mitigated through roaming regulations and simplifications of telecom business models, and today’s smartphones can easily handle the workloads for most simple AR applications.

This leads us to the conclusion of this analysis – most pieces of the puzzle are in place to get things rolling, but AR for tourists hasn’t taken off yet. The research for this analysis suggests that the reason is the lack of portable mobile data plans across borders and applications that harness the huge crowdsourcing potential. Many apps are either proofs of concept, or strictly limited to a certain area, a small number of languages or a specific set of locations, with little to no possibility for users to help out with filling in the blanks. For instance, the Word Lens demo from 2010 gave us the impression that we can throw away that dictionary or history book, but in reality (pun somewhat intended) the accuracy is not nearly enough to keep you out of trouble, as it is currently a glorified version of Google Translate. Demos of apps such as GeoTravel show both the possibilities as well as the issues. Currently, the most developed apps in this category are those that map out the night sky, and similar simple things. But in order to be truly helpful to a family standing in the rain looking for vegan food, we need applications that act as a local friend rather than algorithm demos, and we still seem to have a few years to go in that regard.