Proposal for a User-Centered Virtual Reality System for Promoting Tourism in Peru

ABSTRACT

Tourism has a substantial impact on the economy of different regions of the world such as Latin America, however due to the health crisis generated by COVID-19 this sector has been one of the most affected, for this reason, different investigations have been carried out focused on solving the problems generated by the pandemic. Therefore, it has become necessary to implement new technological alternatives that allow promoting alternative tourism;for example, take virtual tours of different tourist attractions with the help of virtual or augmented reality. In this article we present a proposal for a virtual reality application focused on promoting tourism in Peru using a user-centered design. To make this proposal, an analysis of tourism in Peru was carried out, analyzing the impact of the pandemic in Peru and the most visited attractions in the city of Arequipa to select the scenarios to be virtualized. An important aspect of the proposed is the creation of a user-centered design, for which a set of functions focused on users was proposed, such as the use of a map to select the tourist attractions to visit, showing updated information of the tourist attractions, the use of multiple methods of movement in virtual reality environments and a camera that allows taking pictures when navigating the virtual scenario. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.