Electronic mobile guides: a survey

Sensors, 2014

Currently, museums provide their visitors with interactive tour guide applications that can be installed in mobile devices and provide timely tailor-made multimedia information about exhibits on display. In this paper, we argue that mobile devices not only could provide help to visitors, but also to museum staff. Our goal is to integrate, within the same system, multimedia tour guides with the management facilities required by museums. In this paper, we present iMuseumA (intelligent museum with agents), a mobile-based solution to customize visits and perform context-aware management tasks. iMuseumA follows an agent-based approach, which makes it possible to interact easily with the museum environment and make decisions based on its current status. This system is currently deployed in the Museum of Informatics at the Informatics School of the University of Málaga, and its main contributions are: (i) a mobile application that provides management facilities to museum staff by means of sensing and processing environmental data; (ii) providing an integrated solution for visitors, tour guides and museum staff that allows coordination and communication enrichment among different groups of users; (iii) using and benefiting from group communication for heterogeneous groups of users that can be created on demand.

Sensors

An automatic “museum audio guide” is presented as a new type of audio guide for museums. The device consists of a headset equipped with a camera that captures exhibit pictures and the eyes of things computer vision device (EoT). The EoT board is capable of recognizing artworks using features from accelerated segment test (FAST) keypoints and a random forest classifier, and is able to be used for an entire day without the need to recharge the batteries. In addition, an application logic has been implemented, which allows for a special highly-efficient behavior upon recognition of the painting. Two different use case scenarios have been implemented. The main testing was performed with a piloting phase in a real world museum. Results show that the system keeps its promises regarding its main benefit, which is simplicity of use and the user’s preference of the proposed system over traditional audioguides.

Geoheritage, 2017

Scientific research about geological and geomorphological heritage recently proved to be the base of new opportunities for tourism. The peculiar case of urban landscape analysis offers new frontiers to the traditional urban cultural tourism. The tourism offer based on natural aspects of urban areas is described in this paper thanks to three examples of urban geotourism tools: GeoGuide Lausanne, TOURinStones and GeoGuide Rome mobile applications. Each case focuses on the transfer of geoscientific knowledge from scientific research to the "tourist" content, with the innovative support of the mobile application technology. The apps contribute to the promotion of the links between cultural and geological heritage, which is the goal of urban geotourism: to convey the message that substrate profoundly influences the culture that is established on it. The mobile application technology has many strengths for interpretation, e.g. by overlaying images or adding sounds and videos, which allow the visitors to discover landforms now covered by buildings and infrastructures; it has also technical strengths, such as looking for additional information and organizing the city visit at home or to re-experience it after the trip. The apps do not have any impact on the field, they are concise, easy to read, interactive and funny. The public understanding of science is very important, it helps enhancing the role of the researchers and the impact of their work on the society and the daily lives of citizens. In this context GeoGuide apps are useful to transfer knowledge and make it usable to people. Keywords geoheritage, urban geotourism, tourist guide, mobile application, knowledge transfer tool, urban landscapes.

Design, User Experience, and Usability: Interactive Experience Design, 2015

With the popularity of new digital media, such as smartphones and tablets, many applications have been designed in order to help tourists at different moments of their trips. This study shows the creative process of designing an app for tourists. The design of this mobile app is a part of a project that aims to investigate the design of mobile apps for tourists and their implications for interaction design and information visualization fields. It also describes the method, the stages, and different approaches taken during the creative process. In addition, some related studies on designing such apps are reviewed. It finally shows some reflections on the possibilities, difficulties and challenges designers have while trying to create an innovative app for tourists.

Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2019

This paper provides a two-phase study to compare alternative techniques for augmenting landscape scenes on geography fieldtrips. The techniques were: a pre-prepared acetate overlay; a custom-designed mobile field guide; a locative media app on a smartphone; a virtual globe on a tablet PC; a head-mounted virtual reality display, and a geo-wand style mobile app. In one field exercise the first five techniques were compared through analysis of interviews and student video diaries, combined with direct observation. This identified a particular challenge of how to direct user attention correctly to relevant information in the field of view. To explore this issue in more detail, a second field exercise deployed 'Zapp', a bespoke geo-wand-style app capable of retrieving information about distant landscape features. This was evaluated using first-person video and spatial logging of in-field interactions. This paper reflects upon the relative merits of these approaches and highlights particular challenges of using technology to mimic a human field guide in pointing out specific aspects of the landscape scene. We also explore the role of students acting as design informants and research co-participants, which can be mutually beneficial in promoting a critical appreciation of the role of technology to support learning about the landscape.

2021

El protocolo experimental es un instrumento que formaliza el quehacer experimental describiendo las particularidades y las entidades convergentes en el diseño de experimentos y permite la reproducibilidad de los mismos como piedra angular de la práctica científica (Soldatova et al., 2014a). En esta tesis se propone un modelo de recomendación de protocolos experimentales basado en el contexto de uso del usuario. Como caso de estudio se analizan los protocolos experimentales de los ensayos de laboratorio de Ingeniería Civil que están normalizados en los estándares ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials). Partiendo desde la especificación formal del protocolo experimental se obtiene un modelo de representación que permite describir de manera individual, las diferentes entidades (y sus relaciones) que convergen en este producto de la actividad científica, contribuyendo a la formalización de los protocolos experimentales en un dominio de conocimiento que ha sido poco explorado ...

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2018

This paper reports on an empirical study that compares two sets of heuristics, Nielsen’s heuristics and the SMART heuristics in the identification of usability problems in a mobile guide smartphone app for a living museum. Five experts used the severity rating scales to identify and determine the severity of the usability issues based on the two sets of usability heuristics. The study found that Nielsen’s heuristics set is too general to detect usability problems in a mobile application compared to SMART heuristics which focuses on the smartphone application in the product development lifecycle instead of the generic Nielsen’s heuristics which focuses on a wide range of interactive system. The study highlights the importance of utilizing domain specific usability heuristics in the evaluation process. This ensures that relevant usability issues were successfully identified which could then be given immediate attention to ensure optimal user experience.

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 2019

This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a codesign process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2016

Tourists visiting unknown destinations become increasingly dependent on mobile city guides to locate tourist services and retrieve informative content about nearby points of interest (POIs). Several mobile guides already support the provision of personalized tour recommendations to assist tourists in making feasible plans and visiting the most interesting POIs within their available time. However, existing tourist tour planners only regard available attractions as sites lacking physical dimensions (i.e., POIs are treated as 'points'). This restricts the modeling of POIs as attractions that may be entered/exited from a certain location (e.g., the main entrance). Although this is adequate for scheduling visits at museums, galleries, small squares or parks with single entry points, it fails to capture practical properties of typical tourist visiting styles in urban destinations. Tourists commonly appreciate strolling through pedestrian zones, market areas or urban areas of architectural, cultural and scenic value rather than only visiting sites of restricted access or taking the fastest route to move among city landmarks. Herein, we introduce Scenic Athens, a context-aware mobile city guide for Athens (Greece) which provides personalized tour planning services to tourists. Far beyond than just providing navigational aid, Scenic Athens derives near-optimal sequencing of POIs along recommended tours, taking into account a multitude of travel restrictions and POI properties, so as to best utilize time available for sightseeing. Unlike similar tools, our application incorporates scenic (walking) routes (in addition to point POIs), thereby supporting more experiential exploration of tourist destinations. This broader perception of tourist attractions substantially increases the complexity of the entailed optimization problem's modeling. A user evaluation study validated the recommendation value, usability and perceived utility of the proposed application. Keywords Tourist trip design problem Á Scenic routes Á Orienteering problem Á Time window Á Context awareness Á Web service Á Mobile application Á Android Á Performance test Á User evaluation

Information Technology & Tourism, 2019

The paper presents an interactive electronic guide application prototype able to recommend personalized multiple-day tourist itineraries to mobile web users. The proposed application relies on an evolutionary optimizer that allows the determination, in an acceptable time, of a near-optimal user-adapted tour for each day of the visit by considering different conflicting objectives. The tour optimizer automatically plans the itinerary by selecting the sights of potential interest based on user preferences, the available visit time considered on a daily basis, opening days and hours, visiting times, accessibility of the places of interest and weather forecasting. The interactive functionalities and facilities provided by the application are illustrated along with the model used to adapt the tourist itinerary to user preferences and constraints. An experimental qualitative and quantitative evaluation has been performed to assess the validity of the guide prototype. Particular attention has been devoted to the usability of the application and its graphic unit interface along with user satisfaction.