Partners from NTUA participated at the online conference 4th Euro-Mediterranean with the presentation entitled “A Web-Based Platform for Promoting Cultural Tourism: The Case Study of Meteora, Greece”. The abstract of the work presented is the following: In this paper, an innovative web-based platform for the promotion of smart cultural tourism is introduced. The platform aims to upgrade the cultural electronic services and attract a new generation of tourists, by integrating culture into the tourism experience and promoting the history and the culture of a site. The platform supports the multi-dimensional documentation of the natural, religious, historical and cultural characteristics of significant sites, with the following functionalities: (i) visualization of detailed and highly accurate 3D models; (ii) differentiation of the details of the 3D models based on scale; and (iii) link to a database with various kinds of spatial and non-spatial data (e.g., archaeological and historical information, architectural drawings, images, videos, 3D models). The platform may be used by tourists before, during and after visiting a site of interest. The different user scenarios are the following: (i) virtual tour to a site of interest through either supervised or free navigation; (ii) virtual tour to a site of interest and simultaneous search for information; (iii) search for information about a site of interest; (iv) localized virtual tour; and (v) detection of alternative activities and points of interest. Additionally, a mobile augmented reality application for tourists, complementary to the web-based platform, for enriching their perception of the surrounding cultural landscape with additional elements/information related to the earlier form or current state of a site is available. The case study is part of the UNESCO world heritage site of Meteora, Greece, which combines an impressive natural environment with a unique monastic complex at the top of inaccessible huge rocks.
The presentation was given by the team of the Laboratory of Photogrammetry of NTUA and it is available here.