Next Generation Tourism

Imagine you are traveling to Madrid for the first time and you want to get to know all the must-see places such as Parque El Retiro, Museo del Prado, Plaza Mayor and many others, or you just want to know a restaurant to for a nice dinner. If you don’t want to pay large amounts of money to a tourist guide, Augmented Reality (AR) is the perfect solution.

Once in El Museo del Prado, again, you have the option of paying a tourist guide, who will bombard you with information you will probably forget by the time you arrive back to the hotel, or you have the option of taking an interactive tour through the museum, which will enhance the experience in a way you never imagined. In fact, there is a company called Digital Binocular Station which is developing binocular stations within the museums that with the use of AR, when you look around the museum using the binoculars the objects, paints or statues come to ‘life’ in order to enhance the experience of museums or even historic places and landscapes. Watch the following video in order to get a better sense of this digital binocular stations.

AR will not only show you the places you need to visit, it will also take you there using GPS, give you insightful facts about that place, but more interestingly it could allow you to see that same sight in different time periods. Lets say you are in New York and the application takes you to Time Square, you could see how that same place looked 10, 20 or even 100 years ago. How interesting would be to go to Berlin and see how the Berlin Wall looked before it was demolished?

Below is a video that shows you an application that is already available, called Rio that allows you to get to know Rio de Janerio, Brazil in a very interactive and convenient way.

If you want to learn more the Digital Tourism Think Tank released an interesting report talking about the potential and many applications that AR has in the tourism industry.

From the business side, AR in tourism is also an excellent business opportunity for Hotels and Restaurants, since business can post special offers and events through the applications. For example you walk near a Hotel, you can watch virtually the rooms and even book a room. We believe that AR will revolutionize tourism in every aspect and we can expect that in the future people will be using more and more these applications when they travel.