INTERACTIVE MOBILE BASED TOUR GUIDE
M.U.E.Wijesuriya1*, S.U.Mendis2, B.E.S.Bandara2, K.P.Mahawattage2, N.Walgampaya2, D. De Silva2
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* Corresponding Author, Faculty of Computing, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), Malabe, Sri Lanka. Email: mshi_87@yahoo.com 2 Corresponding Author, Faculty of Computing, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), Malabe, Sri Lanka.
ABSTRACT Sri Lanka being a popular tourist destination entertains a large number of tourists each year. Tourists are issued a printed guide booklet to find out interesting places during the visit. Due to the lack of up to date information and navigation support, tourists are not able to visit all the attractions during a visit. Our researched was based on discovering a solution to improve this situation providing convenience to the visitors. This paper presents the work carried out in developing an interactive mobile tour guide application to replace the traditional tour guide booklet. Main features of the application are; virtual tour of important places located, voice based information provider, location identifier and a map based path selection function to select the best path to a specified destination within the premises. The application was developed based on the Android platform, and delivered as a mobile application. Main goal of this project is to help the tourists to travel on their own and take full advantage of the visit without missing the main attractions. Key words: Augmented Reality, Android, GPS-Global Positioning System, Web Service, Smartphone, XML-Extensible Markup Language
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INTRODUCTION
The introduction of smart phones has made a significant impact on the lives of the people leading to major improvements in mobile application developments during the past few years. These days’ mobile phones are used to provide numerous functions in addition to conventional voice communications. The capabilities of smart phones enable the
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