University develops tourism app for Davos

The new Augmented Swiss Heritage app brings visitors closer to the cultural heritage of Davos with the help of AR.

If you want to experience Davos' cultural heritage in an immersive and participative way, you can do so with a new app. The new Augmented Swiss Heritage app uses augmented reality (AR) to show guests the sights of Davos. The following video shows how the Augmented Swiss Heritage app has captured around 30 locations on certain hiking routes and overlaid them with animated explanations.

The project has now been presented as part of the Digital Competence Circle organised by discover.swiss, the platform for digital transformation in tourism.

Tourist product for tech fans

Project manager Simonne Bosiers, lecturer at the FHGR Institute for Multimedia Production, explains that the FHGR explicitly wanted to create a tourist product for the tech-savvy public. According to FHGR, this is innovative because it makes content available that is not generally known or accessible and presents these virtual themes audiovisually in a composition with reality.

For example, when people go to the Kirchner Museum Davos with the app and stand in front of the bed that the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner carved for Erna Schilling, the app brings a portrait of Erna to life and shows her describing the bed. Kirchner spent the last 20 years of his life in Davos.

The museum teamed up with the FHGR for this project, together with the Davos Museum of Local History and the tourism promotion organisation Destination Davos Klosters. The FHGR was responsible for the content, while the augmented reality specialists from the agency Afca.ag from Zollikofen in the canton of Bern developed the software.

Samuel Rosenast, Head of Communications & Content Destination Davos Klosters, comments: "This brings culture and history to life, which represents great added value for us."

The app was developed by the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons (FHGR) and will also be used in other regions.

The app is available free of charge in the respective stores.

Source: abouttravel / Youtube