Starter Kit. Idea 80 of 500. Cluster 4
Augmented reality tours of heritage sites
The mechanism, from the book
An app that tells people what is happening tonight converts a day visit into a 2-night stay.
The first step
Choose one ruin at one site and have an illustrator draw how it looked, based on published reconstructions. Put the drawing on a phone so a visitor can hold it up against the ruin. Test it with 10 visitors and ask what they would pay to have the whole site rebuilt in the same way. Their price is your proof.
- Who pays first
- Visitors who stand in front of a ruin and cannot see what it was, and will pay to see it rebuilt.
- What leaves today
- The ruins cannot show what they once were; the reconstruction is the value visitors pay for, and it can be built here.
Ask first
- Central Cultural Fund. Ask whether their images and plans of the sites could be licensed for an app.
- Information and Communication Technology Agency. Ask whether they support small firms building heritage apps.
Check before you spend
That the history shown is accurate, that the rights to images used are licensed, and how visitors' data in the app is protected.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a visitor pay for an augmented reality tour?
- What does building the tour for one site cost?
- How many visitors carry phones that can run it?
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.