M-TOURISM: An Interactive Touring and Learning Application For City Exploration

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.