Talking Houses: Transforming Touristic Buildings into Intelligent Characters in Augmented Reality

Abstract Augmented reality (AR) technologies can enhance the user’s experience of visiting attractions, shops, and restaurants by using AR-based virtual elements and additional information about the places they are visiting. In this work, we transform the city landscape or iconic buildings into a unique experience by bringing iconic characters onto the buildings to increase users’ engagement. Our techniques transform buildings or parts of a building into a virtual character with which the user can interact. We designed two unique experiences: (a) ‘The Square’ in which the character will talk about the building’s history and other anecdotes about the area, and (b) ‘The Hunt’ in which the user is involved in a scavenger hunt where they have to identify buildings using the hints given by virtual characters. We have conducted a live user study to assess our prototype’s usability. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrated that our prototype has high usability and users using our system felt a pleasant and enjoyable experience.