Augmented reality tour system for immersive experience of cultural heritage

Cultural heritage sites, such as traditional palaces, have a wide range of services to help tourists understand them easily and to provide more attractive experience. However, these services are not easy to provide intuitive information about cultural relics to tourists because they typically use guide books or audio equipments. In this paper, we propose an augmented reality system for tourists' immersive experience at cultural heritage sites. The proposed augmented reality tour system provides an opportunity for tourists to have more realistic experience by showing virtual characters, which reproduce the past life at heritage sites. Its usefulness and effectiveness are verified by applying to a tour system at Sajeongjeon and Gangnyeongjeon of Gyeongbokgung, which is the representative of the cultural heritages in Korea.