AR Tour Builder and Experience

AR Tour Builder is an online tool for creating custom AR tours, retrieving 3D objects from CH repositories such as Europeana and associating them with locations on a map. It is complemented with the AR Tour Experience, a mobile app that allows visitors to experience phygital tours by superimposing 3D digital objects onto the physical world (AR) and providing other types of accompanying digital information

• AR Tour Builder: Museums and heritage sites; Archives working with urban or landscape heritage; Educators; Tourism and local heritage stakeholders
• AR Tour Experience: Visitors interested in exploring a location at their own pace, Pupils, students, and other guided groups; Site mediators and tour guides

• Create and manage custom AR tours using a browser.
• Define POIs for the tour on a map. 
• Attach 3D models, images, audio, video and documents to POIs.
• Additional multilingual content support.
• Preview tours before deployment.
• A visitor-facing AR Tour Experience app, designed to serve tours on-site.

• Loading of custom AR tours on a mobile device
• Designed for outdoor heritage contexts
• GPS-based activation of POIs
• View 3D models in overlay AR using the device’s camera
• On-site access to images, audio and text
• Multilingual user interface
• Dynamically updated to reflect the latest edits made via the AR Tour Builder

• The AR Tour Builder just needs a web browser, Internet connection, basic digital skills and access to content assets hosted on an online platform (3D models, images, audio, texts)
• The AR Tour Experience requires users to have a smartphone with camera (Android) and AR capabilities (information on supported devices available here), GPS access, and sufficient internet connectivity also based on the type of content displayed in each tour.

A regional heritage site wishes to offer visitors an AR walk of their site. Using the AR Tour Builder:

1. The curator creates a new project on the AR Tour Builder.
2. They can place Points of Interest on the map.
3. A set of items of various formats, including 3D models,images, textual documents, and links can be added to each POI.
4. Short explanatory text and audio can be added in the desired language(s).
5. Short explanatory text and audio can be added in the desired language(s).
6. The tour can be tested on-site via the accompanying AR Tour Experience mobile app.

Then, a solo tourist is visiting the heritage site. They have a mobile device with GPS enabled and wish to explore the site based on their interests and at their own pace. The visitor may have already downloaded the AR Tour Experience app and selected their desired AR tour or may do this on arrival.

1. The visitor opens the AR Tour Experience app and selects their desired AR tour.
2. As the visitor explores the site, they are prompted about nearby POIs.
3. Moving to a POI, the app presents to the visitor a selection of relevant objects  associated with the respective location.
4. The visitor can choose to visualise a 3D object in overlay AR mode, thus being able to inspect hidden or missing elements at the location.
5. The app provides additional rich content (including images, textual documents, links to external resources such as a quiz), allowing the visitor to explore the location context more deeply.

• A complete AR tour package ready to be experienced by visitors on-site via the AR Tour Experience app, that delivers an engaging, self-guided AR tour curated by the heritage site through the AR Tour Builder, allowing the visitor to explore the site, its locations and context on their own terms.