Abstract— This paper presents a mobile application that helps tourists acquire information using three types of views—AR, map, and list view—each of which has different drawbacks and benefits. To deal with the disadvantages of each view, we propose a view-management component to change the layout depending on the context. I. INTRODUCTION Although there is a large amount of information that helps tourists, it is difficult for tourists to get the required information through a proper representation while traveling. With the growth of mobile devices, tourists have started using tour applications, such as Google Maps and Bing Maps, which employ the user’s location. Using these applications, tourists have been able to check the things around them quickly. However, they are still limited in their capability to represent information on a tour. Tourists have to switch their gaze while using these applications. There have been accordingly studies on fixing a user’s gaze on both a real object and its information in the augmented reality (AR) community [1]. BOTTARI [2] is an AR application for personalized and localized restaurant recommendations. Metaio Museum AR [3] is an interactive and guided tour AR application through the museum. However, if there is a lot of augmented information, information representations can overlap with others or become occluded by the device screen. Layar [4], Junaio [5], and Wikitude [6] are mobile AR browsers that obtain information based on the user’s location. But Layar and Junaio provide only AR views. Wikitude lacks flexibility to respond to a user’s keyword search. In this paper, we propose a mobile tour guide to not only provide map- and list-based services but also render AR content according to user’s context. Because proper view depends on tour information types, as shown in Table 1, we enable tourists to freely choose from the three different views depending on their status. Views are managed by the proposed view-management component, so that tourists are not distracted by the tour information. TABLE 1 PROPER VIEW BY TOUR INFORMATION TYPES Proper view Necessary information for tourists on a tour List Thumbnail, label, and short description information Map Information’s location, current location, Routing AR In-situ surrounding information, Routing, Audio guide This research is supported in part by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) and Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) in the Culture Technology (CT) Research & Development Program 2014 and by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Institutional Program (Project No. 2E24790). II. METHODOLOGY The overall framework of Tour Cloud Mobile (TCM) is composed of three views: list, map, AR. First, in the list view, tour information is retrieved as the result of a keyword search and is represented by a consistent format, as shown in Fig. 1a, that shows items in a vertically scrolling list depending on the number of results. Therefore, it can help tourists when they need to see a large amount of information quickly. Second, the map view provides a top-down perspective as shown in Fig. 1b. It is easy for tourists to search tour information that contains the location data around them and route to the places they want to go. Third, the AR view provides a first-person perspective to align the user’s sight with the device’s view as shown in Fig. 1c. Because of the sensitivity and limitations of computer vision, tourists had to keep fixed their device’s view on what they want to see and got the information in AR view. Thus, most of the earlier AR tour applications have had to be precisely aimed at the target. We provide tourists the flexibility of getting proper information according to their situation not only using three dedicated views but also using enhanced view management for augmentation in AR view. TCM’s AR view is composed of a webized mobile AR framework [7]. Moreover, its content structure is composed of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, which are identical common web pages. Thus, the augmented object arrangement logic can be implemented in a JavaScript library form [8], which simplifies the management of augmented objects for each tour contents. (a) (b) (c) Fig. 1. (a) well-organized list format, (b) top-down perspective, and (c) first- person perspective III. SUMMARY OF THE SYSTEM Fig. 2 shows the system architecture of TCM, which is implemented as a mobile device application. Tourists can select and change views depending on their own situation. The tour contents DB is composed of a Point of Interest (POI), course, and story. The POI is the data in which tourist might be interested (e.g., the Statue of Liberty). The course is a set of POIs and an inside POI are connected to each other. The story is user created contents (UCC) uploaded by other tourists. It might be composed of POIs or course information and rendered in the AR view. 1 Tour Cloud Mobile: Helping Tourists Acquire the Information Effectively Using Three T ypes of Views Jungbin Kim †‡ , Byounghyun Yoo ‡ , and Heedong Ko ‡† † University of Science and Technology, Korea, ‡ Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Korea bin88829@imrc.kist.re.kr 2015 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) 978-1-4799-7543-3/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 673