A Travel Guide for Virtual Bruges

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) October 15, 2007 -- Second Life, 15 October 2007. The Travel Guide for Virtual Bruges is now available. Several kiosks are placed at different locations in Virtual Bruges (SLURL) that give away the guide for free to the visitors. The guide contains facts about “real‐life” (RL) Bruges houses such as architecture, shopping and restaurant information.

To provide information about the reconstruction of Bruges, Belgium in Second Life, we didn’t choose to place boards near the houses that would hinder the view, but have developed a HUD that show information about the houses the avatar is seeing.

The HUD calculates at each moment to position at which the avatar is looking at and retrieves all information from a remote database. This can be compared to a RL tourist that flips through the pages of a travel guide when looking at a particular building or monument. All information is personalized for each tourist, e.g. the tourist standing beside you might be looking at something else and might consult other pages from his own guide. The same situation is possible with a HUD in Second Life; two avatars standing side by side, but looking at another building will retrieve different facts.

Together with the launch of the Travel Guide HUD, a website is available with more in‐depth information about (Virtual) Bruges at http://www.virtual‐bruges.be. The website contains more information about RL and SL Bruges, including the weekly events that are organized in Virtual Bruges.

More information about the Travel Guide HUD and underlying technology is available at http://www.louisplatini.com (A white paper is available in which more information is given about this Augmented Virtuality Application). For questions you can contact Louis Platini in‐world or at Louis.Platini@gmail.com

augmented virtuality     second life     travel guide     virtual bruges     virtual reality     virtual tourism