Augmented Reality for Smart Tourism in Religious Heritage Itineraries

Abstract

Pilgrimages and travel for other religious reasons are two of the major drivers of human mobility. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can contribute to sharing knowledge about religious heritage with tourists, residents, and religious communities. ICT innovations that help individuals find information and acquire knowledge about cultural heritage can bring new experiences and sensations to tourists and residents, in general, and to those who have accessibility problems, in particular. These innovations include augmented reality, location-based services, social networks, gamification, and intelligent interfaces. This paper focuses on religious and spiritual routes and itineraries, presenting a religious tourism experience model that allows tourists to acquire additional knowledge about cultural and religious heritage, based on technological architecture using intelligent human-computer interactions displayed on personal mobile devices. This approach expands personal and spiritual experiences when travelers visit religious heritage sites associated with itineraries.

Smartness and social networks as shapers of the tourism industry

“…Social networks are online communities where people connect to each other, gather to socialize and exchange viewpoints, information and images on topics of common interest, which can be socially or business oriented (Putro et al, 2016;Ramos et al, 2016). Thus, social media is one of the fastest growing phenomena on the internet and a suitable vehicle for doing business, advertising purpose and customer acquisition and retention (Lichtle Fragoso and Sánchez Salinas, 2014).…”

The Role of Mobile Technology in Tourism: Patents, Articles, News, and Mobile Tour App Reviews

“…The first theme of mobile technology in tourism that is attracting researchers' interest is short range wireless technology such as Radio frequency identification (RFID) [97][98][99] and Near field communication (NFC) [67,76,77,100]. The second theme includes augmented reality [101][102][103][104] and virtual reality [105], which enables a pre-experience for a user [33]. This theme is noted in tourism research as tourism marketing tools [106].…”

Gamification in tourism and hospitality research in the era of digital platforms: a systematic literature review

“…Concerning the affordances adopted, it emerges that the most utilized were virtual experience (Séraphin et al , 2017; Skinner et al , 2018; Ramos et al , 2016; Fischöder et al , 2018; Dingli and Mizzi, 2018; Mesáro et al , 2016; Correa and Kitano, 2015), rewards (Lee, 2019; Swacha and Ittermann, 2017; Dingli and Mizzi, 2018; Tsai and Lee, 2017; Correa and Kitano, 2015) and storytelling (Fischöder et al , 2018; Dingli and Mizzi, 2018).…”

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