Castelo Novo is one of the member villages that make up Portugal’s ‘Historical Villages’network, a cluster of urban nuclei, which came into being before the founding of the Portuguese nation.

Atop one of its town’s castle turrets sits the Virtual Sightseeing Scenic Viewer (VSSV), a type of virtual guide that Fundão Municipality assures will leave no visitor asking “What exactly am I looking at?”

The VSSV, deployed for the first time at another castle in north-central Portugal in 2005, lets visitors use the unit to scan the surrounding landscape. Points of interest are detected and displayed in real-time on the unit’s built-in touch-screen. Using Augmented Reality technologies, the VSSV lets visitors view information in the form of text, images and videos about any selected point of interest.

In addition, the VSSV at Castelo Novo also offers visitors a taste of what traditional life was like in that part of the country by including a 3D recreation of a Sheppard herding his flock just outside the castle walls, and a video of a Knights Templar scouting the surrounding countryside from atop Castelo Novo.

YDreams has deployed 13 similar VSSV units throughout Portugal over the last six years. Click HERE to watch a video of the VSSV in Cascais, just outside Lisbon.

Charming and historical Monsanto, dubbed ‘the most Portuguese village in all of Portugal’ has a new claim to fame: it is the first town in the country to offer visitors and tourists an outdoor audio-guide system for exploring the town’s numerous highlights.

The audio-guide system developed by YDreams, runs on GPS-enabled PDAs that feature up to 24 points of interest in Monsanto. Visitors to the village no longer need to navigate the streets with confusing paper maps; instead the system’s integrated GPS technology automatically detects points of interest that are within the visitors’ range and triggers audio narrations, and displays additional images about each one.

Monsanto Audio Guides are managed and rented out to visitors by Edeventos, a local events organization firm. The amount of information provided by the audio-guide is incomparable to using a traditional map or guidebook, plus they come in three languages and there is even a version developed especially for children.

In the meantime, YDreams is currently working on a next-gen audio-guide, which aside from incorporating GPS and compass, will also integrate augmented reality technology to liven things up even more. So globe-trekkers, stay tuned – a new reality may be right around the corner in a town or city near you.

Check out the video below for a better look at the audio-guide in action (coverage in Portuguese):

Since mid February, booth contractor Grup Servis has been the keeper of two YDreams’ Magic Books.

These Magic Books, originally created for client Turismo Madrid, for the FITUR ‘08 fair, are now roaming the country’s other tourism exhibitions, set at smaller versions of the successful stand built in January for Madrid’s renowned Tourism Fair.

So far, the Magic Books’ interactivity has been featured at tourism fairs in San Sebastian, Valencia and Barcelona. The system’s plug-and-play simplicity, YDreams availability and the metal-stand’s sleek design have proven to be key factors for Grup Servis.