Augmented reality as a new way of exploring the city: unified platform for data providers

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to present the ways of using augmented reality as part of location based services. These tools have become very popular after the mass using of smart phones and navigation technologies. The objective of the paper is to introduce a unified web-based platform invented for data providers for smarter transformation of the static data. We used developer's interfaces of the most popular augmented reality mobile apps (Layar and Wikitude) to utilize them in to the user-friendly web platform which provides comfort for content creators. Thus we have a simple and very effective tool for dynamization of static data (points of interests in the cities) to the dynamize form suitable for augmented reality apps. The implementation of the web-based platform is being realized among Czech destination management organizations and will be released under the open source license. This approach comes with the unique benefits for data providers/content creators and could bring new point of view for big data presentation to the public.