An Innovative Platform for Creating Audience-Specific Gamified Cultural Tourism Guides Where Art, Tradition and Culture, Technology and Business Converge

Digital realities and gaming combined with existing communication technologies offer tremendous opportunities in the development of strategic innovative marketing. In parallel, the cultural and creative industry is in need of new platforms through which museum staff, cultural organizations, tourism and related industry will have access to a set of easy-to-use authoring tools that facilitate the creation and maintenance of personalized gamified cultural travel guides in the form of mobile apps. In this framework, this research paper focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of a cultural guide authoring platform and applications which offer multilingual, 3D and Augmented Reality (AR) gamified experiences to mobile users. The respective apps developed can be ported on many platforms and with these 3D tools a non-experienced user can in a few minutes easily create a city guide with articles, routes, mini-games and AR content using only drag and drop features. At the same time the mobile applications present city guides and general tourism information and services to the users.