LocatAR - An Augmented Reality Application for Local Points of Interest Identification

In unfamiliar places, people tend to look up Points of Interest (POIs) information either on the Internet or by asking locals. To benefit from content on the Internet, the travellers pay more attention to the graphically rendered information on the screen rather than the environment, which can lead to road accidents. Moreover, asking pedestrians for POI information often proves to be misleading. To overcome this problem, the transmission of location-based information is done in Augmented Reality (AR). The process results in less cognitive and physical activities as the users are not obliged to switch attention back and forth between information space and real-world view. In AR, location-based information appears immediately without blocking the real-world view. As a result, the LocatAR, an application is built as a personal tour guide, using location data to identify a POI in Augmented Reality (AR).LocatAR database contains Google Maps coordinates, phone numbers, and website links that represent each POI. Building LocatAR involves no AR Foundation and AR SDKs, which makes the software cost-effective, run on AR incompatible smartphones, and lightweight. To evaluate the application,thirty volunteers use LocatAR to complete a questionnaire for 14-days qualitative research. Ultimately, the study revealed 70% of the participants agreed that LocatAR correctly identifies POIs and delivers enough POI information.