Aixplorer: Aachen's Mobile Guide Platform

Aixplorer is the location-aware mobile multimedia guide for Aachen, developed by Prof. Jan Borchers and his Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University.

Based on your current location, the Aixplorer offers you the most relevant information about the history of Aachen, its buildings, places, exhibits and artefacts in your vicinity. This gives you easy, direct access to the information that matters most where you are now — like a printed city guide that always opens on the right page, or a good (and knowledgeable) friend taking you on a tour of the city.

Since 2009, the Aixplorer guides you through the Aachen City Hall. Here, in each room the Aixplorer automatically shows you the right content to learn more about the history - and stories - of City Hall and its exhibits.

On the upper floor of City Hall, you can experience a medieval coronation feast in the coronation hall. Thanks to Corona, you can move through the audio scenery of the feast here, by walking around the room — in the world's first immersive 3D audio simulation of its kind.

Since 2015, the Aixplorer also guides you through the new Centre Charlemagne, Aachen's modern city museum on the Katschhof between Dom and City Hall. Again, modern building technology combined with Bluetooth beacons and special software running on the Aixplorer makes sure that you always get to those audio tracks about the exhibits right next to you, quickly and easily. The audio tour itself is designed to be especially accessible and entertaining.

However, City Hall and Centre Charlemagne are just two stops on the Route Charlemagne, which connects historic and modern sights throughout Aachen's inner city. In the near future, the Aixplorer will guide you through the entire inner city along the Route Charlemagne. Today, if you're on the market square in front of City Hall, you can already find out more about the City Hall façade, the Charlemagne fountain, and adjacent buildings.

This project was funded in part by the EU and the State of NRW through their Ziel-2/EFRE program, and the German B-IT Foundation.


Internal pages (login required)