Interactive virtual environment focused on gamified tourism

Abstract

The present document constitutes the Final Degree Project’s Technical Report of the Video Games Design and Development Degree offered by the Universitat Jaume I. The work to be developed consists in creating an interactive virtual gamified environment focused on tourism, through geolocation and augmented reality tools based on smartphones. It covers aspects about the planning, decision making and conceptual design of the final product and implementation details involved in the development of the complete application during the course of a few months by Francisco Alfaro Moscardó, student of the before mentioned Degree. The aim of the project is providing both residents and visitors some knowledge about the main monuments and places of interest of the Valencia city historical centre (Spain). The application has been developed using Unity 3D game engine combined with a set of current libraries that allow to have a better performance and management of the event interaction and Augmented Reality. The geolocated system is based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and is fully integrated with two different augmented reality mini games that are part of the whole experience and give players some added challenges before giving them the historical information about the monuments. Furthermore, the application communicates remotely with Google servers to provide services such as the modification of the database where the areas data is stored or the use of the Google user account for unlocking achievements and be part of a worldwide ranking.