International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad develops smart guide

Hyderabad: Researchers at the Centre for Visual Information Technology, IIIT-H, are developing dynamic and smart virtual tour guides for tourists visiting heritage sites. The virtual guide will depend on videos relayed by the camera of a smartphone for informing tourists about the site they visit.

As a tourist walks in a heritage site with his smartphone's camera on, the virtual tour guide will give audio information regarding the heritage site based on the tourist's coordinates and the video streamed through the camera.

A prototype has been developed by researchers for the Golconda fort in Hyderabad and for a few monuments at Hampi, a Unesco world heritage site.

The virtual guide is smart enough to understand the interests of the tourist.
Depending on where the tourists walks, slows down or halts, the virtual guide will develop its narrative from prefed data.

If a tourist walks past a sculpture slowly or has halted to observe it, the virtual guide will take that to mean the tourist is interested and provide in-depth detail. If a tourist just walks past, the virtual guide will provide brief information.

Mr Anurag Ghosh of CVIT, a researcher working on the project, said it was possible to include more features like having an interactive guide based on artificial intelligence. If a tourist focuses on a particular detail of a monument or an artefact, the virtual guide would provide more details regarding that particular selection.

Prof C.V. Jawahar, head of CVIT and supervisor of the research, said, “The technology works by keeping track of what the user does. Our solution detects where the user looks and understands the user's interest. Users have different priorities. Our solution generates the narrative based on all these aspects.”