Encouraging cultural exploration: A dynamic tour guide based on personalised contextual information and ad-hoc planning

Because of the difficulties in navigating public transport networks and finding out about available activities, cultural tourists tend to follow a pre-planned itinerary and to visit a fairly small set of well known attractions. An analogous situation emerges at the cultural heritage sites themselves: while cultural heritage sites typically have a large amount of archive material, only a small amount of information can be presented, therefore visitors tend not to explore the culturalsignificance of exhibits in depth. Our solution represents a complete mobile information system for travellers intended to encourage exploration. The system consists of three modules: firstly location-based information intended to enhance the cultural tourist's understanding and to suggest exploratory activities based on modelling the users interests; secondly ad-hoc itinerary planning functionality to give the user the confidence to explore and a novel augmented reality system for presenting information in a user friendly way using markerless tracking. This paper covers the research and development aspects of iTACITUS, a sixth framework programme project, reporting on both technical and coordination issues, as well as interaction issues encountered during the project trials.