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location-based technology + journalism

Creating a mediascape spectacle

By Joyce Chang

Unlike celebrities, most journalists don’t typically walk around with an entourage. But our team’s test creation of a Mediascape today resembled that sort of spectacle, raising curious looks from fellow students and even a Chicago Sun-Times reporter.

As we tested our location-based mobile tour while walking near our classroom in Evanston, we took photos and videos of ourselves to document our process, while being giddy with excitement when multimedia elements (also known as “media events”) would trigger as expected on the device.

Although our final project will focus on planned Olympic venues throughout Chicago, we wanted to see for ourselves that we could easily load photos, audio and video into the GPS device, and that they would automatically be displayed or heard at the appropriate locations along our mini-tour.

The test run proved to be useful in identifying some of the following limitations to consider when developing our final project, as well as potential solutions:
• Difficulty viewing the GPS device’s screen outdoors (Possible solution is to provide a visor to shield the screen from the glare of natural light)
• Difficulty hearing audio without headphones, especially near busy traffic intersections (Solution is to provide headphones to tour participants)
• Difficulty viewing video (Possible solution is to download a Pocket PC Flash player onto the GPS device or to re-save videos using the detailed specifications suggested by the Mediascapes Wiki help files)

One of the more worrisome problems was that the Mediascape tour did not work when we retraced our steps on our return trip. We thought it could be that the device only triggers a multimedia event once, rather than multiple times when covering the same ground. So we restarted the device and started it at the beginning point of our return trip. But the device still failed to trigger events at several points. The device finally worked after another try, but the test run raised questions about reliability and possible signal interferences.

Suggestions from our test run included:
• A desire to have the multimedia only play once for a given spot (If the user pauses in a particular spot, we don’t want the multimedia to continue to loop and to repeat the same material.)
• A welcome screen that remains until users enter a hotspot for multimedia (otherwise, users just see an empty black screen until they trigger a multimedia event.)
• A pause function during the tour
• A primary use of color photos rather than black-and-white images, which didn’t appear as clearly or have as much contrast on the device

Here are some images from our test run today (Click on each to get a larger view):

Thursday, May 1st, 2008 Filed under Locative storytelling |