Creating Location-Based Augmented Reality Games and Immersive Experiences for Touristic Destination Marketing and Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors!

The work is interesting and definitely useful!

The development, implementation and practical application of IT solutions based on virtual and augmented reality technologies, taking into account the achievements of artificial intelligence, is a current trend these days, without any doubt.

However, despite the overall positive impression, there are a number of points to which you should pay close attention before further promoting your article, namely:

1. It is necessary to expand the review of literary sources reflecting the high contribution of scientists and practitioners to the development of computer applications, the use of virtual and augmented reality technologies, as well as artificial intelligence objects in solving the problem.

Conduct a comparative analysis of the current state of the issue, and note the advantages of the solutions you propose. Give emphasis on scientific novelty.

2. Please provide the architecture of your development.

3. As a developer of engineering applications of artificial intelligence, I believe that the readers of the Journal are also interested in the technical side of the issue. It is necessary to highlight the details of the development. Describe the functional organization. Obviously, you didn’t just use standard tools of the development environment, but added your own classes? Emphasis should be placed on this.

As a recommendation, please pay attention to how a similar problem was solved :

Abu-Abed, F.; Zhironkin, S. New Game Artificial Intelligence Tools for Virtual Mine on Unreal Engine. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 6339. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13106339

4. The choice of development tools requires justification. Considering that this is a scientific and practical work, I recommend adding a table reflecting comprehensive information on instruments, methods, note (in your opinion/based on your experience) the advantages and disadvantages regarding the problem being solved, and then draw a conclusion in favor of choosing one or another solution.

5. The process of integrating development onto mobile platforms is poorly understood.

6. I did not find the practical recommendations that you stated for application developers.

7. If we are talking about the development of gaming artificial intelligence, the problem was clearly solved using some theory (for example, utility theory, remaining trees, etc.). Add a small section with justification for the theoretical arguments.

8. Section "Results" should contain methodological results.

9. "Discussion" Section should estimate approaches, described in the Introduction Section.

10. The text of the article contains stylistic errors. I recommend proofreading the document by a native speaker.

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Good luck with revisions!

Pay attention, please, to paragraph 10 of the section "Comments and Suggestions for Authors".

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Please find our responses on the attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting paper that reports on some thoughtful use of interactive technologies in the tourism and heritage sectors. The overall design of the development and research is good, and the rationale for the approach taken is clearly justified.

However, there are 3 important issues that need to be addressed before I would recommend this paper for publication, as follows:

1. The term "Augmented Reality" is too loosely defied and used. The definition of AR is "a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view" (OED) and specifically refers to the user's view of the physical place they are in being augmented when viewed through a device such as a camera or AR glasses. The first 2 games described in the paper do not have these features. The argument is made that location-based information appearing on a mobile device is a form of AR, but this claim needs to be at least discussed further. It doesn't fit with the generally understood definition of AR I've cited above, and location-based information systems have been around for a while. Indeed, many of these guides are now commercially available, e.g. GuideAlong, which offers very similar functionality (GPS location-based information sent to mobile devices about the area you are visiting) to the first 2 apps described in the paper. These guides are generally described as "tour guides" - if you are going to describe them as AR, you need to be able to make a robust justification for that. The third app is an AR application as it augments the user's view of the physical world.

2. The usability testing section needs significant further work. Firstly, it is not clear what is being tested. The first sentence of Section 6 refers to "the application's" usability - i.e. single, implying that all that follows in this section is about testing an application. Then the first subsection refers to testing the applications - i.e. plural, and seems to refer to the specialist testing of the location-based apps. Then the next section doesn't say which interactions in the Immersive Lab are being evaluated at all. Is it just the AR game in the Lab? If so, the game in the Lab is very different from the location-based apps, so what does users' responses to the Lab game tell you? Or were you asking for their evaluation of the Lab as a whole? This needs significant clarification. In some of the evaluation questions the term "mixed reality" is used. To what does that refer? In the paper you refer to the location-based apps as AR, not MR. What constituted the MR you asked participants to rank? How did you gather the data from participants? Did you explain to them that they were part of your research? Did you gather any personal information? What ethical protocols did you follow regarding gathering and keeping personal data? Did you get ethical clearance from your university before carrying out the research? There needs to be a much clearer description of the methods used to gather and analyse the data.

3. The questionnaire results in section 6.2 contain no analysis - merely a report on the statistics. The pie charts are unnecessary for the limited information that they contain, and the histograms simply show the number of people answering in each category of the Likert scales for each question. There is no actual analysis. You need to ask yourselves questions such as were there any differences in response between different demographic groups? How is the data associated, e.g. did level of immersion affect likelihood of visiting Western Macedonia? As Likert data is ordinal in nature, then non-parametric statistics are most applicable.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors!

Thank you for your response and provided answers.

And here are my additional recommendations:

1. The work is not a “breakthrough” in the industry, so the novelty of the work must be clearly presented at the end of the Introduction.

2. The manuscript quality could also be improved by including a bibliometric analysis of what has been published in the last 10 years using keywords. There are several software that allow you to do this research, such as the freeware VOSviewer.

Good luck with revisions.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Thank you once again for taking the time to review our paper. Please find our responses to your comments in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for re-submitting your paper and for attending to the issues I raised in my review. I feel the paper is now much clearer regarding its definition in use of the term "augmented reality" and that the data analysis includes association tests that help to make the meaning of the questionnaire results clearer.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

Thank you very much!