ETourism Augmented Reality
From LRDE
A toolbox with augmented reality applications for mobile devices to assist tourists before, during and after their visit
The project « eTourism Augmented Reality », has been chosen among over 70 candidates as one of the 18 winners of the first call for proposals « Scanning technologies and enhancement of cultural, scientific and educational content » within the framework of the Investment Program for the Future launched by the French government. This project, planned for 30 months, has a global budget of 7 millions of Euros. The consortium involves two project leaders, i-Marginal and CEA-List, three start-ups, LTU, DiotaSoft and XediX - several research partners - i-Matériel.Lab, Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) and LRDE, and institutional partners such as Atout France, Centre Pompidou , La Cinémathèque Française, Issy Media and Villa Arson.
« eTourism Augmented Reality » aims at inventing intelligent augmented reality dedicated to tourism and cultural heritage. The goal is to design optimized programs for smart phones and touch pads that provide access to enhanced digital content and allow interaction in real time by using navigation avatars, intelligent 3D object recognition, contextualized data superimposed on the real environment, connection with smart objects… Many solutions helping to guide us, inform us, entertain us, and assist us in various fields of our daily life, particularly designed for tourism and cultural activities. Thanks to a single platform, users of this intelligent augmented reality tool will be able to combine object recognition of art work and architecture, 2D and 3D image registration, analysis of text bodies, overlay of interactive navigation avatars, precise geolocation, indoor and outdoor navigation, text translation in real time…
The role of the LRDE within this project is to carry out automatic extraction of text in images on mobile devices. The aim is to use semantic information that has been extracted in order to enhance the data transmitted to the user, either by translating or by completing them. The user can, for example, take a picture of a work of art in a museum with his mobile phone. The application will then extract automatically the name and the description from the image in order to translate the text into the user’s language and offer him links to more information on the work. This system will work in spite of the variety of types of the texts (size, font, color,…) and within a reasonable time for a mobile device (low-power, limited memory, …).