Enhancing cultural tourism by a mixed reality application for outdoor navigation and information browsing using immersive devices

Abstract

In this paper a mixed reality application is introduced; this application runs on Microsoft Hololens and has been designed to provide information on a city scale. The application was developed to provide information about historical buildings, thus supporting cultural outdoor tourism. The huge amount of multimedia data stored in the archives of the Italian public broadcaster RAI, is used to enrich the user experience. A remote application of image and video analysis receives an image flow by the user and identifies known objects framed in the images. The user can select the object (monument/building/artwork) for which augmented contents have to be displayed (video, text audio); the user can interact with these contents by a set of defined gestures. Moreover, if the object of interest is detected and tracked by the mixed reality application, also 3D contents can be overlapped and aligned with the real world.