Quick response codes are now being used to help to assist foreign visitors to understand the attraction.
Though Tokyo One Piece Tower was first opened in March, it wasn’t until just recently that QR codes were added to the attraction in order to make it easier for tourists from other countries to be able to understand what’s going on.
One Piece is a massive international sensation but not everyone who likes the series speaks Japanese.
The manga based anime series has hundreds of episodes and is loved by fans around the world. Tokyo One Piece Tower is an attraction that was created in order to provide fans with a place to visit and share in their love of the series. However, until now it has created a struggle to visitors who don’t understand Japanese, let alone being able to decipher kanji (written Japanese characters). Now QR codes are about to change that struggle by opening up the experience to languages outside of Japanese.
The QR codes have been added to 28 different signs located around the tower so that translations can be obtained.
These quick response codes have been added above and beyond the bilingual crew members who have been hired by the attraction. Those employees wear color-coded badges so that visitors from other countries can look for the color that aligns with the language that they speak. While this will be helpful, the QRcode option will make it possible for visitors to be able to help themselves when they stop at any of the different barcoded signs.
The 28 signs can be scanned through the use of a smartphone with any free reader app already installed and open. When the barcodes are scanned, they display a translation of the sign’s original message in the language of the smartphone of the user. This allows the language to be automatically detected and selected for the user.
Upon the launch of the QR codes, the translations were available in any of twelve different languages, which included: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Malay and Thai. There are English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean guidebooks that are also made available to visitors.
If London Assembly member Tony Arbour has his way, mobile devices will be the key tool for tourists.
Conservative London Assembly member and mayoral hopeful, Tony Arbour, believes that there is a great deal to gain from the use of geolocation, QR codes and NFC technology when it comes to expanding the tourism in the city beyond the central area.
Many tourists miss out on some of the best features of the city because they never hear about them.
While Londoners would be able to tell you about the Horniman Museum, the Royal Air Force Museum, Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, and Richmond Park, many tourists are still visiting the core points of interest such as Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. Essentially, tourists are missing out on some fantastic attractions and those attractions are missing out on the tourists. Arbour feels that if iBeacons using geolocation technology are combined with the use of QR codes, this problem can be rapidly resolved.
The key would be to use a Visit London mobile app which provides relevant information through geolocation tech.
In order to use it, visitors would simply need to load the app. Then, whenever they travel near iBeacons throughout the city, they would receive information that is relevant to where they are so that they will be more aware of the types of attractions and points of interest that they could be visiting but that they might otherwise have missed.
This will help them to see more than just inner London and to experience a great deal more of the city. It will also help the economic benefits of that tourism to spread outward toward other boroughs of the city.
Arbour has created a report that he has entitled “Unknown London”. He is hoping that Visit London, the tourist agency of the city, will change its current priorities and will use geolocation, QR codes, and other technologies to spread the benefits of tourism to new regions of London. As an example of the way it would work, he stated that “…a tour of London food markets could guide the tourist, via a series of codes or beacons, from one market to another, giving the history of each market, providing up to date vouchers and local dining and of course providing advice transport advice to the next stop on the route.”
