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Supporting the Mobile In-situ Authoring of Locative Media in Rural Places:
Abstract
Providing users with carefully authored Locative media experiences (which can be consumed via their GPS equipped smartphones or tablets) has significant potential for fostering a strong engagement with their current surroundings. However, the availability of mobile tools to support the authoring of locative media experiences in-situ, and by non-technical users, remains scarce. In this article we present the design and field-trial expert evaluation of a mobile app developed under the SHARC project (Investigating Technology Support for the Shared Curation of Local History in a Rural Community). The app is named SMAT (SHARC Mobile Authoring Tool) and supports the authoring of Locative Media experiences with a focus on the creation of POIs (Points of Interest) and associated geo-fences which trigger the pushed delivery of media items such as photos, audio clips, etc. One important requirement of SMAT is the ability to support authoring in places where connectivity is intermittent or unavailable, e.g. many rural areas.
... LoMAK [9] enable domain specialists to generate locative media mobile apps from KML files. SMAT [10] is a mobile app that supports the authoring of locative media experiences with a focus on the creation of POIs (Points of Interest) and associated geo-fences which trigger the pushed delivery of media items such as photos or audio clips. Projects like App Inventor [11] and Puzzle [12] are more suitable for developing generic mobile applications lacking the support for specific issues concerning contextawareness. ...
This paper presents the IVOML language, the foundation of the IVO (Integrated Virtual Operator) platform which enables the creation, deployment and execution of context-aware mobile applications by end-users without programming skills. We use an event-driven workflow model to describe the behaviour of the applications. Thus, whenever the defined context occurs, the corresponding work-flow immediately starts reproducing the desired behaviour without the need of user intervention. The IVO platform comprises two composite tools that provide a visual programming environment for editing IVOML files. IVOML can be used at runtime in mobile devices, by providing interpreters that run the applications written with the composite tools. This allows any created application to be distributed and executed on mobile devices based on various platforms without the need for maintaining separate versions. To test the whole platform, an Android and an iPhone runtime were created which provide the necessary support for the execution of the applications developed using IVO.
... New technology can be used to promote special places by providing users with carefully authored locative media experiences [2], to force users to explore their surrounding by challenging them to visit new, unfamiliar places [6] or to facilitate solitude by providing guidance on how to avoid other people [10]. There has been some more related research in the field of navigation in general (e.g. ...
Wearable sports technology such as fitness trackers or smart watches has become ubiquitous in our everyday lives, resulting in a vast collection of recorded routes. This technology now enables new forms of tracking and sharing outdoor adventures, that go beyond prosaic descriptions and photographs of the tour. Existing web mapping services and online tour diaries already allow mountaineers an improved preparation of tours but it remains still a time-consuming and cumbersome task. In this paper we introduce the concept of pioneers in outdoor activities. The proposed concept lets people define their pioneers, which are other ambitious athletes who are well known and trusted experts of the area. Using the segments of their tracks and other personal preferences (e.g. length, elevation and difficulty) a personalized route that is based on the pioneers' activities is generated and recommended to the user.
... There is a vast corpus on related work in the area of supporting people while navigating in outdoor environments as for example described in [8]. New interaction technology can be used to bring people to defined places to enjoy the same experiences [2] or to facilitate solitude by providing guidance on how to avoid other people [7]. Sports track- ing [1], for example, has been suggested for climbing [4,5,6] and backcountry skiing [3]. ...
Mobile and wearable computing has great potential to support alpine outdoor sport activities. This includes, but is not limited to, rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, paragliding, and skiing. Interestingly, technology for tracking, monitoring and supporting sport activities is broadly used in sports like running or cycling, but has not reached the top of the mountains yet. Nevertheless, such technologies could support people in many mountain scenarios such as activity tracking, navigation, or emergency support. Technologies and applications for mountaineers can learn from ubiquitous computing research in many ways to provide more joyful, motivating and safer outdoor experiences.
This workshop is building on the ideas and findings of the successful UbiMount '16 workshop and aims to further explore the newly established research direction of ubiquitous computing in the mountains. During this one day workshop the participants will present their positions and research, followed by a demo session and group exercises.
... There is a vast corpus on related work in the area of supporting people while navigating in outdoor enviroments e.g. as described in [8]. New interaction technology can be used to bring people to defined places to enjoy the same experiences [2] or to facilitate solitude by providing guidance on how to avoid other people [7]. Sports tracking [1], for example, has been suggested for climbing [4,5,6] and backcountry skiing [3]. ...
Mobile and wearable computing has great potential to support alpine outdoor sport activities. This includes, but is not limited to, rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, paraglid-ing, and skiing. Interestingly, technology for tracking, monitoring and supporting sport activities is broadly used in sports like running or cycling, but has not reached the top of the mountains yet. Nevertheless, such technologies could support people in many mountain scenarios such as activity tracking, navigation, or emergency support. Technologies and applications for mountaineers can learn from ubiquitous computing research in many ways to provide more joyful, motivating and safer outdoor experiences. This workshop addresses the promises and challenges that arise, when UbiComp technologies are applied to alpine activities. During this two day workshop the participants will present their positions and research, followed by a hands-on experience on current technology during a field trip.
... The SMAT Android app has been developed in order to support the requirement for mobile authoring (identified earlier in section 2.2.1). An early version of the SMAT tool is presented in [9]. The UI of the current version of SMAT (presented here) has been significantly revised following an additional expert evaluation that took place in August 2015. ...
Locative Media Experiences (LMEs) have significant potential in enabling visitors to engage with the places that they visit through an appreciation of local history. For example, a visitor to Berlin that is exploring remnants of the Berlin Wall may be encouraged to appreciate (or in part experience) the falling of the Berlin wall by consuming multimedia directly related to her current location such as listening to audio recordings of the assembled crowds on 10th November 1989. However, despite the growing popularity of enabling technologies (such as GPS-equipped smart phones and tablets), the availability of tools that support the authoring of LMEs is limited. In addition, mobile apps that support the consumption of LMEs typically adopt an approach that precludes users from being able to respond with their own multimedia contributions. In this article we describe the design and evaluation of the SHARC2.0 framework that has been developed as part of our long-term and participatory engagement with the rural village of Wray in the north of England. Wray has very limited cellular data coverage which has placed a requirement on the framework and associated tools to operate without reliance on network connectivity. A field study is presented which featured a LME relating to Wray’s local history and which contained multimedia content contributed by members of the community including historic photos (taken from an existing ‘Digital Noticeboard’ system), audio-clips (from a local historian and village residents) and video (contributed during a design workshop). The novelty of our approach relates to the ability of multiple authors to contribute to a LME in-situ, and the utilisation of personal cloud storage for storing the contents associated with a multi-authored LME.
... Technological aids are also used e.g. when hunting with dogs [10] or tracking sports [1], and more concepts have been suggested e.g. for mountaineering [8] and backcountry skiing [7]. Technology can be used to bring people to defined places to enjoy the same experiences [6] or to facilitate solitude by providing guidance on how to avoid other people [9]. It can offer a way to bridge different ways of knowing, such as those of indigenous or rural inhabitants in e.g. ...
Being in nature is typically regarded to be calming, relaxing and purifying. When in nature, people often seek physical activity like hiking, or meditative, mindful or inspiring experiences remote from the urban everyday life. However, the modern lifestyle easily extends technology use to all sectors of our everyday life, and e.g. the rise of sports tracking technologies, mobile phone integrated cameras and omnipresent social media access have contributed to technologies also arriving into the use context of nature. Also maps and tourist guides are increasingly smart phone or tablet based services. This workshop addresses the challenges that are related to interacting with technology in nature. The viewpoints cover, but are not limited to interaction design and prototyping, social and cultural issues, user experiences that aim for unobtrusive interactions with the technology with nature as the use context.
Tourism activities in the tropics region are significantly different from other parts of the world due to its distinctive features such as a mean annual temperature of 25 degrees Celsius, an abundance of sunshine, heavy precipitation which occasionally can induce monsoonal rainfall, high levels of humidity, dense vegetation of the rainforest, and diverse marine life. Although forest hiking has become one of the attractive interests in this wide area, the liveliness of enjoying a jungle walk might be discouraged by fear of getting lost, fear of unreachable locations by emergency vehicles, and fear of natural disasters which might lead to unpredictable subject anxiety. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model of the Internet of Things (IoT) system to support a forest hiking tourism experience. It consists of three functional sub-systems i.e., environmental monitoring sensors, tracking and tracing beacons, and early warning sensors. We propose to employ Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) architecture and communication protocols to deal with long-distance data transmission. The proposed system can provide benefits for online operational monitoring and tracking visitors’ movements to quickly detect any disruption in the field such as missing persons. The system can also be used as an early warning system when a disaster like a landslide, tsunami, wildfire, volcano eruption, or flood takes place. Several other aspects related to the security, privacy, and interoperability of the proposed system will be addressed to achieve its optimum functionality. The proposed system including both hardware and software interface will be designed and developed using co-design methods. The iterative process and stakeholder engagements used in the co-design may lead to systems that are more acceptable and relevant to the needs of an individual in a unique environment like the tropics forest.KeywordsInternet of thingsCo-designUsabilityForest hikingTropics tourismTracking and tracingEarly warning systemUser experience design
In this chapter we present our longitudinal study of a community photo display system known as the Wray Photo Display (Taylor and Cheverst in Int J Hum Comput Stud 67(12):1037–1047 2009, in IEEE Comput 45(5):26–32, 2012) and how members of the community used this display to interact with their past (and each other). Our development of the Wray Photo Display commenced in 2006 as part of a research project which set out to investigate how situated displays could support rural communities, and in particular how such displays could support notions of community. Our analysis of the user generated content (in the form of images and associated comments) submitted to the system reveals a significant proportion related to cultural heritage. The current focus of our work with the Wray community is to provide residents with more sophisticated tools (including mobile tools) to support the shared collection and curation of narratives relating to local history.
This paper introduces the CollaTrEx framework for collaborative context-aware mobile exploration and training. It is particularly designed for the in-situ collaboration within groups of learners performing together diverse educational activities to explore their environment in a fun and intuitive way. Aside from employing both absolute and relative spatio-temporal context for determining the available activities, different buffering levels are an important conceptual feature supporting seamless collaboration in spite of temporary connection losses or when in remote areas. CollaTrEx comprises a prototypical front-end implementation for tablet devices, as well as a web-based back-end solution for the creation and management of activities which can be easily extended to accommodate both future technologies and novel activity types.
This paper presents a user-study of the TOTEM.Scout mobile tool that has been developed for in-situ creation of location-based content for games and edutainment applications based on configurable data templates. It works in cooperation with the TOTEM.Designer web-based tool and enables convenient structuring, management and export of the created content to prepare arbitrary location-based experiences. We motivate the necessity of this tool as well as its architecture, and describe the layout, results and findings of the performed case study in a real context of use. The results provide insights into possible improvements in terms of user interface and the tool’s functionality design, and suggest new features for data collection and management.
Evaluating the usability of mobile systems raises new concerns and questions, challenging methods for both lab and field evaluations. A recent lit- erature study showed that most mobile HCI research projects apply lab-based evaluations. Nevertheless, several researchers argue in favour of field evalua- tions as mobile systems are highly context-dependent. However, field-based us- ability studies are difficult to conduct, time consuming and the added value is unknown. Contributing to this discussion, this paper compares the results pro- duced by a laboratory- and a field-based evaluation of the same context-aware mobile system on their ability to identify usability problems. Six test subjects used the mobile system in a laboratory while another six used the system in the field. The results show that the added value of conducting usability evaluations in the field is very little and that recreating central aspects of the use context in a laboratory setting enables the identification of the same usability problem list.
The emergence of personal cloud storage services provides a new paradigm for storing and sharing data. In this paper we present the design of the SHARC framework and in particular focus on the utilization of personal Dropbox accounts to provide a scalable solution to the storage and sharing of community generated locative media relating to a community's Cultural Heritage. In addition to scalability issues, the utilization of personal Dropbox storage also supports 'sense of ownership' (relating to community media) which has arisen as an important requirement during our on-going 'research-in-the-wild' working with the rural village community of Wray and involving public display deployments to support the display and sharing of community photos and stories. While the framework presented here is currently being tested with a particular place-based community (Wray), it has been designed to provide a general solution that should support other place-based communities.
Ubiquitous computing promises to enable new classes of application. In this paper, we present research intended to accelerate the exploration of the space of possible application values by enabling domain specialists to develop, deploy and evaluate experimental applications, even if they do not have pro- gramming skills. We present a framework for the rapid authoring of me- diascapes, a commercially important class of media-oriented, context-sensitive, mobile applications. A case study is described in which two artists without prior experience of ubiquitous computing successfully and quickly deployed experi- mental mediascapes in an urban square. A discussion of their experience sug- gests future work aimed at closing the gap between application emulation and reality.
In this paper, we present the usability evaluation of IVO (Integrated Virtual Operator), a platform that supports the rapid development of contextaware applications by users with no programming skills. Using only the tools provided by the platform (IVO Builder and IVO Outlook), users can define temporal and spatial conditions and associate them with workflows of activities available within the platform. This way, whenever the defined conditions occur, the user’s smartphone will immediately produce the intended behavior, with no need for user intervention. The applications developed using IVO can easily be made available to other users through a distributed web platform. Moreover, an android client was developed, to run the IVO-developed applications, allowing the smartphone to act as the ubiquitous interaction device. The evaluation of theplatform was performed through usability tests at both the end-user level (android client) and the developer-user level (builder tools).