A key component of any urban dwellers or visitors experience of the city is spatial navigation. People want to know where they are, where they want to be and how to get there. In many cases, people also want to identify places and spaces both to aid navigation and to satisfy their interest in their surroundings. These twin concerns of way-finding and interpretation are particularly important to visitors to a city. In addition, many of the visitors to a World Heritage City such as Bath visit the city as a leisure experience and want to retain and take away with them memories of their experience of the city. The archetypal example is the visitor taking photographs and creating an album when she has returned home. Pervasive technologies offer us an opportunity to provide novel and effective support for way-finding, interpretation and recollection.
Mobile Multimedia blogging
The use of digital cameras makes it easy for visitors to take away and recollect some of their experience of the city. They can also organise and share their pictures by posting them on a website. However, the process of getting the photos from camera to website can be laborious. Once the photos have been transferred, many people wish to add a description to the photos. At the moment, if the user wants a description of the location to be stored, she must manually type it in for each picture. It may be difficult to remember exactly where each photo was taken.
We are implementing a system composed of 2 parts. The first is an application running on a mobile phone, which takes the Global Positioning System (GPS) data of a persons location at user-specified intervals and records it to a GPX file. The second part of the system is a PC based application. This application takes the GPX data and the users photographs and matches the time the photos were taken with the times in the GPX file to find the persons location at the time the photo was taken. The GPS co-ordinates are then compared to a point of interest database to get a description of the location. This description is added to the XML file of the website.
The system also uses the location data to generate a map showing the users route and where each photo was taken.
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