Abstract:
Today, tourism is one of the largest industries in the world and the reason is that
majority of the public used to travel from city to city or country to country in their
daily lives. The designed application, M-tourism, an interactive touring and learning
application for city exploration takes advantage of the latest technologies in order to
support tourism to a new level; combination of navigation and learning of the places
for tourists.
This project intends to develop user, situation and position dependent information in
a seamless manner. In the current tourism systems, whenever a tourist visits certain
famous spots, he has to hire a guide to know more about the place. The guide then
narrates the history of the place and provides additional information about the
important aspects of the tourist spots. However, by using this new generation mobile
application installed on the Android based mobile phone can provide the same
information more efficiently and in a user-friendly manner.
The goal of the project is to explore a city using the Android platform. In this regard,
a prototype was implemented that includes the basic functionalities of city guide
such as showing a map, locating points of interest (POIs) on a map, locating location
of a user, show route direction to POIs, and choose different kinds of POIs to show
on map. Additionally, the application asks interactive and challenging questions
about the desired location once a tourist reaches there. In this way, tourists need to
discover the answers from his/her surroundings.
The results of the application showed that tourists enjoyed while using this
application due to its interactivity and challenging nature. Therefore, it is hoped that
this kind of guides would serve as a useful tool for all travellers in future.
