Wearable Personal Assistants for the Management of Historical Centers: Fid-Bau Portal

Wearable Personal Assistants for the Management of Historical Centers

Izkara, J.L. / Basogain, X. / Borro, D.

One of the main tasks facing the manager of a historical centre is to avoid degradation while retaining the historical value. For this reason, any intervention which takes place on the environment, should be carefully managed. Only when performing a proper diagnosis of the environment and its reality is possible to follow a high quality intervention. The integration of new information technologies has been crucial to the improvement of these processes providing new tools. Within the project called RASMAP, we have designed and implemented a mobile augmented reality platform based on a service oriented architecture. This project introduces the concept of Wearable Personal Assistant (WPA). WPA in the RASMAP platform represents an innovative wearable tool, which provides support to professionals in their daily activities (mechanical engineer, safety responsible person, diagnosis expert, etc.). This tool is based on augmented reality technologies, mobile devices and communication infrastructures. The development of the platform for the WPAs implies addressing several technological challenges: a) to overcome the limitations inherent in the mobile devices: speed, capacity of memory, capacity of storage, graphical features and others, b) to obtain tracking systems that they do not need to alter or to adapt the environment, c) to optimize for the transmission and reproduction of multimedia contents through wireless networks on mobile devices. In this article, we describe the RASMAP platform, as a basis for the development of WPA and the extension of its use for the management of historical centres. The quality and usefulness of the scientific-technological results provided by the WPA have been validated developing a demonstrator for the diagnosis of the conservation status of the historical centre of a small town in the Basque Country. The advantages to be gained by using WPA in the proposed scenario are among others: more efficient processes, improved communication between users, and local and distributed multimedia content records.