LOJOCONNECT.COM
location-based technology + journalism

By Ki Mae Heussner

So, tomorrow’s the big day.

After reporting, researching, recording, foraging the Chicago History Museum for antique photographs of Washington Park and building our Mediascapes, we’re ready to test our Olympics audio tour with actual people.

Tomorrow morning, in Washington Park (the site of the proposed Olympic stadium), we’re holding a public event to demonstrate the potential of locative storytelling. All those who attend will take a GPS-guided tour of the park to learn about the possible community impacts of hosting the 2016 Olympics in Chicago.

This past week, we split our time between Washington Park and our computer screens. If we weren’t walking around, iPAQs in hand, trying to catch a GPS signal, we were in front of our laptops, editing audio tracks, optimizing photographs and peering at Google Maps of Chicago’s South Side.

We’re grateful for the brave few who have agreed to serve as our guinea pigs tomorrow (it’s not too late to sign up…) and we think the trial should go smoothly.

Still, given all that we’ve learned during the past few weeks about locative storytelling and our trusty GPS devices, we do have a few concerns:

- The reliability of our handy dandy iPAQs. When they work, they’re fantastic – beyond geographically orienting users, they do have the great potential to uniquely connect users to the history and the people of a given place. But they don’t always work properly. They’re often temperamental. Sometimes they’re painfully slow to load. When we take a whole fleet of them out for testing, for unknown reasons a stubborn few will refuse to cooperate.

- The quality of our audio tracks. After much editing of scripts and audio recordings, I think we have some fine examples of audio-based journalism for our test subjects tomorrow. But the non-broadcast majors among us had to learn a new kind of writing and thinking to master this kind of multimedia journalism. We also added in ambient noise, appropriate music and other (free) sounds to further engage our listeners.

- The precision of our GPS trigger zones. The Hewlett-Packard Mscape maker is very user-friendly and powerful. It’s been a crucial tool for our class, as we learn about the limits and opportunities in locative storytelling. But the maps that the program imports for users are not very granular. Through trial and error, we’ve been able to place our GPS trigger zones so that as people walk around the park they hear the narration relevant to their locations. But, future iterations of Mscape maker (and other similar programs), should make it easier for creators of GPS-guided tours to determine the boundaries of their trigger zones.

By Ki Mae Heussner

It should have been just a walk in the park. But since we were testing our newly-hatched Mediascape, it wasn’t yet the smooth experience we were hoping for.

After building our Chicago 2016 Mediascape (or GPS-triggered multimedia tour), we drove to the sites of a few proposed Olympic venues to test our project.

As with our first test run, we created a bit of spectacle. (If there’s a way to track down a GPS signal while still looking dignified, we haven’t yet mastered it.) But, after some maneuvering, we succeeded in getting our GPS events to trigger at each of our designated locations.

Using a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ, our final project will allow users to travel to Washington Park, Douglas Park and Northerly Island to learn about the Olympic venues planned for each site as well as the impacts of those venues on the surrounding communities. In testing our tour this week, we learned how we need to refine and adjust our tour to maximize the user experience.

A few of the technical issues include:

- Losing the GPS signal. We knew tall buildings could block the signal; now we know tall trees can have the same effect.
- Making sure the photos are optimized for the device. If a file is too large, the device can’t display it. (This problem is easily solved.)
- Keeping the devices fully charged. If the battery power is too low, the device can’t search for a GPS signal. (This is also an easily-solved issue.)
- Correctly defining the limits of the GPS trigger zone. Using Hewlett-Packard’s Mscape maker, we imported maps of Washington Park, Douglas Park and Northerly Island, and then highlighted the parts of the map that corresponded to the places we wanted users to experience the media events. We learned, however, that it’s difficult to trigger events at very specific places (like schools or fountains) that don’t appear explicitly on Mscape maker maps. We were able to get around this hurdle by anchoring media events to nearby intersections or prominent landmarks.

In addition to these technical obstacles, we also encountered a few ease-of-use issues. For example:

- Five-minute audio tracks seem reasonable when you’re sitting inside a warm classroom, but when you’re standing in an open field in 40-degree weather, five minutes feels like 15 minutes. We learned that we need to shrink each media event and/or direct users to more comfortable locations, such as stadium seats. (Chicago weather, unfortunately, we can’t control.)
- Driving tours require substantial and specific driving directions. Washington Park, for example, contains a fairly simple web of roadways. But when other cars are factored in, the park could prove hazardous for a driver trying to listen to a Mediascape. We always assumed that a driving tour would not be a solo experience, but we now know that each audio track needs to provide drivers with very clear navigational cues.

By Ki Mae Heussner

If the honchos gathered for the Where 2.0 conference this week have their way, navigationally-challenged people like me will never get lost again.

Thanks to the booming location-based services industry, 3D maps, Google mash-ups, geo-tagged photos and travel directions are exploding out of every kind of digital device.

You’d think at some point, innovation in the geospatial industry would plateau.

But no. Geo-industry engineers and activists continue to unveil pioneering programs, applications and tools.

In Burlingame, CA this week, for the fourth year, the Where 2.0 conference convened “grassroots and leading edge developers building location aware technology… with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms and hardware to gain a competitive edge.”

Sponsored by industry heavyweights like Google, Nokia, Microsoft and Yahoo, the conference provided opportunities for the bigger companies to announce new developments and smaller geo start-ups to make their debuts.

Some of the highlights include:

- Nokia’s announcement to extend its mobile navigation system to the Web with Ovi.com, where users will be able to save map locations and routes and then synchronize the saved information with their phones. The application also allows users to save routes to their phones as they walk or drive around a location and then upload that to their Ovi maps.

- The launch of Concharto, an encyclopedic atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. Because the mark-ups are time-coded, it charts history better than other kinds of interactive maps.

- A presentation by John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, revealing that there had been a 300 percent increase in geotagged annotations on Google’s mapping services in the past year. Increasingly, he said, the content is rich media, with links to photos and YouTube videos.

By Hilary Powell

How would you like your phone to buzz about a sale at that store you just passed?

For creating an innovative application with Google Inc.’s upcoming free and open mobile operating system, Android, four MIT students recently won a prize in the Google-sponsored Android Developer Challenge to create software that tests the power of open phone systems.

Yahoo! news featured an article Monday about a class project 20 students were given to design a software program for cell phones that uses Google Inc.‘s upcoming Android mobile operating system. According to the article, the students tested ways to make cell phones act differently according to location. In a way, they tried to endow cell phones with a kind of conscience:

“One project named GeoLife gives users a way to set to-do lists and get reminders on their phones. Walk by the market, and the device might buzz with a message that you’re supposed to pick up milk. Then there was Locale, which lets users configure their phones to automatically adjust their settings when the devices detect themselves in certain zones. So you might set your phone to automatically go into vibrate mode in the office and silent mode at the movie theater, and ring everywhere else.”

Other applications that made it into the top 50 include a program that discovers pricing and other data for any product with a barcode by scanning the code with a cell phone camera, a tool that allows users to navigate and record a route using images instead of maps and a niche innovation that gives golfers real-time, location-specific information, such as the weather and game statistics.

By Ki Mae Heussner

Road trips just got a whole lot more interesting.

Forget books on tape, talk radio and even in-car DVDs. Earlier this month, a team of sketch comedy writers and actors launched what they’ve dubbed the “world’s first satcom” or GPS-assisted comedy.

Called “230 Miles of Love,” the program is a series of comedy sketches that can be downloaded for free to a GPS-enabled mobile phone or other device. As you cruise the M6 motorway – the longest motorway in the UK – the sketches automatically start to play as you reach relevant points.

For example, as you start to grumble to yourself about the expense of an upcoming toll plaza, a short sketch about the pricey nuisance might start to play.

So far, reports and reviews of the satcom say it’s very humorous and no more distracting than a radio show. The program’s producers – Moving Audio – intend for “230 Miles of Love” to be the first episode in a six-part series of locative media comedies about transport and geography.

They’ve also taken a very open, transparent approach to the project. On their Web site, they clearly explain how they made the GPS tour (they recorded the whole thing in one day and edited it in two) and invite others to experiment with the tools themselves.

The Moving Audio team used Kansas-based Geovative Solutions’ GeoTours Premium to create the satcom but emphasize that the company also offers free applications.

By Joyce Chang

Our project was initially discussed as a way to depict a future event – to show what Chicago would look like if it wins the 2016 Olympic bid – but we’ve also realized that locative storytelling can be a rich tool for envisioning the past.

On May 1, Berlin launched a GPS-based multimedia tour to virtually re-create the Berlin Wall, since very little remains of its physical structure, according to German news site, Spiegel Online. The Mauerguide, a portable device equipped with GPS technology, traces the Wall’s path, offering video and audio eyewitness accounts of the Wall’s creation in 1961 to stop an exodus of people from Soviet-held communist East Berlin.

The Mauerguide tells the story of Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old bricklayer who was shot in the stomach and back by East German border guards as he climbed the Wall in August 1962. He fell back onto the eastern side and was left to bleed to death in no-man’s land as he cried for help.

That is just one of many stories included in the tour. For people who can’t make it to the Berlin Wall site, there are sample tours online. It seems that mostly tourism groups and museums have utilized these types of historical, audio-visual tours up to this point. One reason the media may shy away from using historical locative storytelling is that newspapers generally emphasize current, breaking news, and do not necessarily go into such background depth. But the ability of locative storytelling to provide context for these locations or events makes it a really powerful tool to give a better understanding of history and its lasting effect.

We recently visited the Chicago History Museum to get historical pictures of planned Olympic venue sites. We realized that many of the sites have a rich history, including Washington Park’s role in the World’s Fair in 1893. We also plan to meet with a cultural historian. We will weave these historical pictures and stories into our final project, along with images of the current sites and schematic drawings of what to expect in the future.

By Hilary Powell

GPS has made the world feel like a smaller place, and now the technology is bringing people together socially.

A recent article in Digital Journal describes a Web site that lets users dog-ear their favorite spots on a map.

POIfriend.com allows users to save their favorite locations on a map, and share them with friends. The POI, which stand for points of interest, can be plotted on the highly interactive site and then sorted by category.

Perhaps what’s most impressive is that, according to Digital Journal, “anyone visiting your list can download the POIs to PCs or GPS-enabled devices.”

A Zoomerang online poll found that 60 percent of women said they would feel better navigating roads with a GPS system. A Web site like POIfriend.com is engaging that sense of security. It’s like getting advice from a trusted girlfriend or guy friend via mapping technology.

At least 85,000 points of interest have been downloaded to the site since it first launched in October 2007, which proves someone out there is interested in locative social networking.

By Hilary Powell

A new gadget in cars manufactured by Honda Motor Co. is set to steer drivers in a safer direction.

Honda’s new GPS warns drivers when they’re in high-crime areas, where cars are frequently broken into or vandalized.

The new technology was launched last week in Japan. The feature has yet to make its way to the United States, but concern over the technology has already made its way here from overseas.

Some bloggers have begun to chatter about the social implications of such a device. Would such a tool give certain neighborhoods bad reputations? Would Honda be held liable if the GPS falters and a car is stolen?

As part of the protection plan, the GPS links to local police stations and provides crime ratings by location. If an area is particularly dangerous, the system issues an alert.

According to Yahoo! blogger Gina Hughes (The Techie Diva), there are no firm plans to bring the technology stateside.

Regardless, the the Honda innovation is an example of how GPS technology, in addition to providing navigational information, can be used to share information specifically relevant to a user’s location.

By Ki Mae Heussner

Location, location, location. It’s the most oft-repeated mantra in real estate. But now that location-based services are sprouting up all over the Web, it’s starting to take on a new meaning to more and more professionals in the news media.

Charged with devouring as much as we can about mobile technology and its applications for journalists, team LoJo has been scouting the Web for updates on how newsrooms are adapting to and capitalizing on locative media.

During the past few weeks, we’ve encountered some excellent examples of location-based storytelling that seem likely to push more newsrooms into the emerging geo-journalism space:

- Earlier this month, the New York Times and Google announced a new partnership that allows readers to track articles geographically using Google Earth. (If you want to see what’s going on in Paris, for example, a few clicks on a Google Earth map will show you the latest headlines coming out of the French capital.)

- When protesters attempted to disrupt the Olympic torch procession in San Francisco, the Sacramento Bee used Qik (technology that streams live footage from videophones to a Web-based flash player) to broadcast live videos of the scuffle.

- And, just the other night, as we waited for the results of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary to come in, we were treated to a high-tech presentation on CNN, featuring correspondent John King and a gigantic, touch-sensitive interactive map.

These examples give us the sense that locative media is gaining a foothold in newsrooms across the country, but… we know that there’s a lot going on out there that we still don’t know.

So, to scrape together a clearer picture of locative media usage, we’ve posted a survey online.

If you’re a working journalist or work in the news media in some other capacity, please help us out and complete our (very short) survey. If you don’t work in a newsroom, but know those who do, please forward on the link below.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Pw7knnDn37s7tY0C9sA2Pw_3d_3d

As always, we’ll share the results online, along with our own analysis.

By Joyce Chang

You may already be familiar with voice commands for mobile phones, such as telling your phone to speed dial someone, but how about “voice search”? Microsoft and Yahoo’s recent unveiling of voice-activated Internet search capabilities on mobile phones has me wondering whether this will be the next standard feature on phones.

Microsoft’s Tellme subsidiary launched an application for BlackBerry this week that allows users to simply push the “talk button” on their phones and speak commands into their phones to search for businesses, check traffic and movie times, etc., according to an Associated Press article.

GPS technology delivers search results that are tailored to the user’s current location. Right now, the application only works on newer BlackBerry models, but versions are planned for Apple’s iPhone, among other devices.

Yahoo launched a similar mobile search system, oneSearch 2.0, earlier this month that also works with certain BlackBerry models.

Similar voice command technology such as Microsoft Sync already lets drivers control phones, music players and other devices through voice commands, but users need to be in Ford, Lincoln or Mercury car models. Also, Tellme has been offering voice-recognition service for nearly a year, but it’s been a bit more complicated, as users had to first call or text a 1-800 number in order to access the services.

Voice command technology acknowledges the difficulty of driving or multitasking on-the-go while also trying to navigate through complicated cell phone menus or features. Although Team LoJo’s driving tour would not require users to scroll through menus or conduct Internet searches while driving, since audio tour segments would be triggered by the user’s GPS location, our team indirectly considered this issue.

We discussed what type of content to provide while tour participants are driving or otherwise occupied. I guess the objective is to ensure tour participants are continuously engaged, while also not overwhelming them or otherwise distracting them when they have to concentrate on driving.

Tellme is hoping to add other voice-activated functions, including voice dialing and text message dictation, according to the article.

Watch a voice-recognition mobile search demonstration from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show: