Enhancing the tourism experience using mobile augmented reality: geo-visualization techniques

Geo-Visualization has long been used for geographic knowledge discovery and decision making. It can be applied to geographic analysis, from initial hypothesis development to knowledge discovery, analysis, presentation, and evaluation. There are several geo-visualization techniques available, however, all of them cannot be used on mobile devices since they require a lot of power and processing capabilities which a mobile device cannot provide, hence limiting their use in tourism domain. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to review geo-visualization-based solutions proposed in the literature and to propose a solution that can overcome the limitations related to the use of geo-visualization in tourism. The paper proposes a data, visualization, and view (DVV) taxonomy to evaluate different geo-visualization techniques and then propose a system that can address the problems of using geo-visualization in tourism domain. The proposed system will use the capabilities of the mobile navigations system and mobile augmented reality in combination with animation to represent the objects in motion in real time on the mobile interface. The aspect of representation control will also be considered to allow the users to control the amount and kind of information they want to see. This research work contributes to the broad research area of geo-visualization by investigating various currently available research journals and then deconstructing all the techniques to bring forth a system that can combine the best abilities to create a smart geo-visualizations system that can be combined with mobile augmented reality to be used in the tourism domain.