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.
