TELARSCOPE: A GAMEBASED TOURISTIC AUGMENTED

REALITY TELESCOPE

Dominik Gr

untjens, Daniel Arndt, Jenny Beschorner, Jonas Dietterle, Jens Epe, Paul Kobold,

Tobias St

uttem and Stefan M

uller

Institute of Computational Visualistics, University of Koblenz, Universit

atsstraße, Koblenz, Germany

Keywords:

Augmented Reality Telescope, Gamebased Tourism, Interaction and Exploration.

Abstract:

TelARscope is a gamebased touristic augmented reality telescope. Its interaction and exploration concept is

sufﬁcient for a heterogeneous user group such as tourists. It enables not only to watch augmented content

overlayed at all times statically but also to explore it completely interactively. We evaluated the telescope with

91 real tourists.

1 AUGMENTED REALITY IN

TOURISM

Augmented Reality is often used in tourism. In

(Fraser et al., 2004), a mixed reality system in a mu-

seum was discussed and analyzed. It is concluded

that ‘digital components can effectively deliver in-

formation which enriches subsequent hands-on ex-

ploration’. In (Schn

adelbach et al., 2001), a tripod

system was used to explore a historical site. An-

other project for exhibitions is (Hindmarsh et al.,

2002). The ﬁrst Augmented Reality telescope was

the AR-Ocular XC-01 by Fraunhofer IGD (Lutz et al.,

2004). GeoScope was developed at the Leibniz Uni-

versity of Hannover in 2006 (Brenner et al., 2006).

The difference is that they used a touchscreen dis-

play. It presents geographic information to a large

audience without prior knowledge or instructions.

Another telescope is Timescope by ART+COM in

Berlin. Users are able to watch historical material

recorded at the focused location. A modiﬁed variant

of Timescope is the Jurascope at the Museum of Nat-

ural History in Berlin. It enables the visitor to follow

the virtual transformation of a dinosaur skeleton into

a ‘living’ animal (Juraskope, 2007). ‘One Rock’ is

a very informative project about Augmented Reality

telescopes in public places (Reeves et al., 2005). It

was developed and installed for two months during

an exhibition on a large rock in Morecambe Bay. If it

was pointed at a nearby bottle, a prefabricated video

of microorganisms living on the rock was presented.

Visitors are put under the illusion that they are zoom-

ing into the bottle to watch the microorganisms. The

system was evaluated by user observations.

Augmented Reality telescopes have been used suc-

cessfully in the past. These systems integrate every-

thing needed to build a stationary Augmented Reality

system. None of these projects used gamebased inter-

action and exploration concepts to allow an interac-

tive exploration of the surrounding areas.

Figure 1: Usage of telARscope.

2 TELARSCOPE

Tourists explore new environments every day all over

the world. How can their touristic experience be en-

riched and how can applications add value to their

sightseeing tours? How can they be entertained in a

way that improves the touristic experience and does

not disturb but allow them to learn something in an

intrinsically motivating way? The touristic setting

only allows intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation

doesn’t work (Stier and Gr

untjens, 2011). Tourists

497

Grüntjens D., Arndt D., Beschorner J., Dietterle J., Epe J., Kobold P., Stüttem T. and Müller S..

TELARSCOPE: A GAMEBASED TOURISTIC AUGMENTED REALITY TELESCOPE.

DOI: 10.5220/0003827304970500

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP-2012), pages 497-500

ISBN: 978-989-8565-02-0

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

want to have free time during their holidays. They

do not want to work nor to learn: ‘Regarding the lat-

ter, experiential processes, such as imagining, day-

dreams, and emotions, play an important role in va-

cation choice behavior’ (Goossens, 2000). This lead

us to gamebased interaction and exploration concepts.

These concepts motivate users intrinsically and allow

a positive experience in a short time period.

TelARscope is a gamebased outdoor Augmented

Reality telescope exhibited at the national garden

show in Koblenz 2011 which had 3.5 million visitors.

It is shown in ﬁgure 1. It faces many interesting his-

torical places: Historical bridges, a prussian fortress

- Fortress Ehrenbreitstein - and some other remark-

able locations. It was presented to visitors from dif-

ferent countries, with different spoken languages and

various ages. It is designed to add value to the touris-

tic experience by allowing an exciting exploration of

the area and showing some historical interesting lo-

cations. The hardware was developed by Trivisio

GmbH, Trier. The software component was devel-

oped by University of Koblenz-Landau.

Figure 2: The hardware of the system.

The hardware of the telescope is encapsulated in

a cartridge installed into the telescope’s main tube. It

consists of three components: a computer in mini ITX

format, a display and a camera. The telescope seems

to be a normal touristic telescope. But if a user looks

through it, she or he will be surprised by seeing an

image presented on the display with added informa-

tion from the computer. The whole computer system

is encapsulated in a cartridge which can be removed

easily in the case of necessary maintenances on the

system. The computer consists of an Intel Celeron

T3100 @1.97 Ghz, a Geforce 9400 mobile graphics

card, a 60 GB SSD and 4 GB RAM. There are two

rotary encoders built in to track horizontal and verti-

cal movements of the telescope with 8192 encoding

levels. The installed camera is a Pointgrey Fireﬂy

@61 fps with a resolution of 640x480. In the front

part of the cartridge, an active cooler is integrated.

For maintenance purposes we installed a UMTS stick

to be able to connect to the telescope via VNC. The

telescope is enabled to broadcast its state via email.

A cover at the side of the telescope can be removed

to gain access to a USB connector. A keyboard and

a mouse can be used to maintain the telescope. The

hardware is shown in ﬁgure 2.

3 APPLICATION

We assumed that the average visitor uses telARscope

for about 30 seconds. An application for such a big

exhibition requires for it to work without any spoken

or written language. We couldn’t describe the age of

the users any closer. The noisy environment implies

that we couldn’t use any audio output. Our applica-

tion should be interesting every time. Users leave the

telescope in its actual position and a new user must be

able to use it with full functionality at every time. It

ought to work if the user is using it for a few seconds

only, but it should also enable long time exploration.

Figure 3: Left side: An overlay station. Right side: A

beamer station.

There are several gamebased stations. Each is

a point of interest. There are overlay stations and

beamer stations (ﬁgure 3). In overlay stations, an im-

age of the past overlays the reality. Beamer stations

beam users to another viewpoint (ﬁgure 3). This is

completely innovative. All stations are shown in table

Users should be able to interact with the environ-

ment by merely moving the telescope but they should

also be able to interact actively with the system. We

didn’t want to present the digital contents all the time.

The two buttons on top of the telescope could be used

for interaction but the user should be able to inter-

act without any additional input devices, as there was

a high possibility of users not detecting the buttons.

The ﬁrst button enables or disables a station. The sec-

ond button is a gimmick: It throws ﬂowers into the

landscape.

Similar applications often use simple pointers. In

an augmented reality environment a lot of immersion

is by using icons. We wanted to create an environ-

ment where users get help to ﬁnd the objects to in-

teract with but could also just use the telescope as a

GRAPP 2012 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications

498

Table 1: All stations of the application.

Name Type Content if selected

Fortress Overlay Image of 1789.

Castle Overlay Image of the now

Philippsburg destroyed castle.

Ape Overlay The ape throws bananas

at the user.

Ship bridge Overlay A now destroyed

ship bridge.

Train bridge Overlay Old train bridge.

Tram Overlay A tram existent in

the past.

Balloon 1 Beamer The fortress in a

bird’s eye view.

Balloon 2 Beamer View from the bridge

below the ballon

Webcam Beamer A webcam image

Statue Beamer Koblenz in the past.

plain one. Users should be able to use the telescope

without understanding the interaction concept in ev-

ery detail. Therefore, an intelligent pointer was de-

signed for gamebased exploration: Hints show where

something can be explored and if a user activates it,

augmented contents appear. The curiosity of people

is piqued and there is fun exploring everything and in-

teracting with the contents. Instead of icons, vibrant

auras hint at interactive content and a cluster of ﬂoat-

ing petals accompanying the user replaces a classic

pointer (see ﬁgure 4). Hovering over an aura for sev-

eral seconds causes the petal cluster to change its ap-

pearance from a loose drifting to a more deﬁned for-

mation in the shape of the logo of the national garden

show. The content beneath is executed. When some

content is active, the petal cluster is faded to invisibil-

ity to prevent blocking sights and returns to full opac-

ity when the user leaves the current aura. Alongside

its selection mechanic the petal cluster is designed as

entertaining content itself. It draws the initial atten-

tion and gives the ﬁrst hint that something is odd. It

follows the users movements and can be spread out

and pushed around.

We developed WatchGART (WatchGuard for

ARTelescopes) to watch the state of the main appli-

cation. In case of an application crash, it can restart

the application. If it isn’t successful, a status email

is sent. In this case, one can connect via internet to

the telescope. A MemoryFile class serves as an inter-

face for the communication between the main appli-

cation and WatchGART. After the system is booted,

WatchGART is started automatically. After the ini-

tialization, an ‘Out of order’ image is displayed in

fullscreen mode. The telescope’s main application

will be started by WatchGART in front of this.

Figure 4: Auras around selectable objects ant the intelligent

pointer.

4 EVALUATION

We evaluated the whole system with 91 real tourists

with an average age of 35.86 years. There was no spe-

cial evaluation setting. The average user group size

was 2.57 persons consisting of 0.64 children, 0.64

adolescents and 1.29 adults. The average time of

use was 33.8 seconds. All questions should be rated

by the participants in a range from 1 (‘completely

agree’) to 5 (‘completely disagree’) with the possibil-

ity to leave a question unanswered. The knowledge of

Koblenz was average (2.81 from 5, sd: 1.76). Most

users were interested in history (average: 1.98, sd:

1.02) but didn’t know much about the speciﬁc history

of Koblenz (average: 3.78, sd: 1.27). The interest in

technological inventions and new developments was

high (1.66, sd: 0.87), as well as the interest in new

compuer developments (average 2.21, sd: 1.29). Fig-

ure 5 shows the stations explored by the users. The

most explored stations are concentrated in the area

telARscope faces at. Users moved the telescope less

an expected. Fortress Ehrenbreitstein is the tallest

and most present building in this area.

Figure 5: Stations explored by the users.

We evaluated the telARscope’s concept, interac-

TELARSCOPE: A GAMEBASED TOURISTIC AUGMENTED REALITY TELESCOPE

499

tion, innovation, comfort and social interaction. The

overall score is shown in ﬁgure 6. Users found the

overall concept apart from the knowledge transfer

good (average: 1.99, sd: 0.088). The knowledge

transfer was rated average (average: 2.68, sd: 0.82).

The innovation of telARscope was considered good

too (average: 1.63, sd: 0.21). The overall concept

of telARscope worked. The system was fun, interest-

ing and innovative. If such a system should provide

knowledge transfer, there should be an explicit con-

cept for it.

Figure 6: The overall score of the evaluation with standard

deviations.

Most people didn’t understand the interaction con-

cept in every detail (average: 3.11, sd: 0.52). Due to

the heterogeneous user groups, the standard deviation

is high. The average time of use (33.8 seconds) is too

short to explore the interaction concept completely. If

users don’t explore the interaction concept in every

detail, telARscope still works as if there was static

augmented reality content. The interaction concept

works with every type of usage, it allows tourists to

explore everything interactively in detail or merely to

explore the stations in a short time.

The comfort of telARscope was rated good (aver-

age: 2.38, sd: 0.91). There is no optimal height for

a telescope. A block of wood has been installed in

front of telARscope so that children could step on it.

Because of this, children moved telARscope even less

because they had to move the wooden block too. It is

very hard to use telARscope’s lense because one has

to look straight through it to see the installed monitor.

The social aspects of telARscope have been rated

good (average: 2.29, sd of 0.64). People interacted

socially by speaking about it with their companions

and discussed about it. This adds value to the touris-

tical experience too.

5 PROSPECTS

The idea and concept were very much appreciated by

the users. We are going to advance our gamebased

interaction and exploration system by tuning our pa-

rameters and by designing, implementing and reeval-

uating new interaction concepts. In the develeopment

process, we developed an SDK. We are going to ad-

vance it with authoring opportunities. New concepts

could be implemented more easily and less time con-

suming. We are going to be able to test more interac-

tion and exploration concepts to ﬁnd out which game-

based concepts work best. We are going to design and

implement approaches to enable gamebased knowl-

edge transfer on telARscope.

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