Mobile City Explorer: An innovative GPS and Camera Phone Based Travel Assistant for City Tourists

Abstract

We present a concept and architecture to provide location aware travel assistance for city tourists based on a combination of wide spread conventional mobile phones with built in cameras and GPS/GALILEO receivers. Novel approaches to improve the support of tourists pre-, on- and post-trip are outlined. The Mobile City Explorer (MCE) enables city tourists to start a tour without time-consuming planning tasks. It identifies sights by taking photos, leads tourists to sights matching their interests and lets them collect multimedia impressions with their mobile phone along the tour. The travel diary stores the collected impressions, is accessible over the Internet, and allows editing and sharing with family and friends. In this paper we outline the system architecture and components that enable these new approaches.