e-Tourism

Description

Both governments and private companies are trying to harness new technologies to promote economically sustainable, environmental friendly, all-year-long tourism. This new tourism favours quality over quantity.

As far as ICT are concerned, research and development of multimedia applications allows visitors to interact with and learn about the culture and history of specific places. The existing multimedia tourist guides are being improved with content tailored to the needs of the specific visitor and with new technologies like mobile videogames. All this has resulted in significant innovation in the tourist sector.


In the field of e-tourism, the IIiA carries out R&D on:

• The development of serious games used to inform players about historical events and cultural aspects of a city or region in a playful and attractive way.

• The application of game technology for re-enacting times and places of interest with a high degree of realism and providing interactivity to the user.

• The use of Augmented Reality and geolocalization to develop new tourist information applications.  These applications run on different mobile devices and highlight tourist attractions and places with historical or cultural relevance for the user.

• The personalization of content for visitors to museums in different types of mobile devices.

The results of the IIiA's projects are applied to historical tourism, virtual tourism, interactive tourism and educational tourism.