An augmented reality tourist guide on your mobile devices

Abstract

We present an augmented reality tourist guide on mobile devices. Many of latest mobile devices contain cameras, location, orientation and motion sensors. We demonstrate how these devices can be used to bring tourism information to users in a much more immersive manner than traditional text or maps. Our system uses a combination of camera, location and orientation sensors to augment live camera view on a device with the available information about the objects in the view. The augmenting information is obtained by matching a camera image to images in a database on a server that have geotags in the vicinity of the user location. We use a subset of geotagged English Wikipedia pages as the main source of images and augmenting text information. At the time of publication our database contained 50 K pages with more than 150 K images linked to them. A combination of motion estimation algorithms and orientation sensors is used to track objects of interest in the live camera view and place augmented information on top of them. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.