AR-Enabled Mobile Apps to Support Post COVID-19 Tourism

The outbreak of COVID-19 has shown many negative impacts on industry, especially when it comes to travelling and tourism sector. In this paper, it is explored how mobile applications incorporating the elements of augmented reality (AR) can be leveraged in order to revive tourism in post COVID-19 era. As outcome, we present three prototype case studies aiming tourism support: 1) AR-driven exploration and sightseeing 2) historical 3D reconstruction 3) gamification approach to sightseeing. For multiplatform mobile application implementation, the synergy of AppSheet and Google Apps Script technologies is used, while for the elements of location-based AR we rely on AR.js web-based library. According to our findings, AR applications have huge potential in field of tourism.