How does user-generated content in media, which use location-based and augmented reality technologies, influence experience and practices of urban tourists?

User-generated content in location-based and augmented reality technologies applications for urban tourism

Such applications do the following:1) Create new understanding of landmark.a) The pool of landmarks, or points of interest (PoIs), is expanded as less known places are brought to light.b) Better documentation opportunities allow one-time events and temporary projects to acquire landmark status just as material objects and regular events.c) Personal landmarks attain public significance.2) Provide wayfinding support.Landmark, route and survey knowledge are three types of knowledge, involved in the construction of cognitive maps and wayfinding. AR and locative media serve them all and improve wayfinding situation.3) Provide route planning support.AR and locative media provide location-dependent and contextual information needed for organizational tasks, associated with route and trip planning. The users' contribution is rather that of linking to other informational assets than that of authorship.4) Provide landmark information in form of facts and narratives.Facts are elements of informational assets, access to which is enabled or simplified. Narratives contribute to the impression of a place as lived and meaningful.5) Facilitate mediated contacts which serve informative purpose.In this case, the focus is on the informative function of communication, and people are viewed as a source of valuable local knowledge. The act of contributing with UGC is the dissemination of local knowledge.6) Facilitate non-mediated social experience.The focus here is on communication in all its complexity, not limited to its informative function. However, this feature depends significantly on the functionality of the application.7) Encourage narrative construction of memories and identity.Locative media provide frameworks and functionality for creating and sharing narrative content.8) Provide framework for documentation.Documentation is relevant both personally and socially. AR and locative media serve as platforms, simplifying the procedures of publication and consumption of content and associating it with a location.9) Contribute to the process of place-making.User input contributes to the common image of the place and to the formulation of its value.

Short story long. Subject matter and scope of studyThe study is focused on the use of location-based and augmented reality technologies in mobile media, which are called location-based media/services/apps, locative media, geomedia, geosocial media etc. Although principles of locative media can be analyzed separately from AR capacity, AR is viewed as an advancement, providing higher locational accuracy and allowing to benefit from visibility as distinguished from proximity.

The specific use case is urban tourism, that is, such uses of AR and locative media which aim at the enhancement of tourist experience and provide technical assistance to city visitors who are not familiar with the environment.

The problematized aspect is the source of knowledge about the city, in other words, the origin of information, which forms the content provided by such applications. This information is located data and local knowledge which come in the form of user-generated content, submitted by the users of AR/LM platforms. Both the production and the consumption of such content are the subject of research.

A number of cases are analysed, including both small-scale local projects and global platforms, in order to present fundamental ideas behind the production and consumption of user-generated content, general conclusions about the existing modes of its use and its value for urban tourist experience.

Why urban tourism?The tourist situation, or the situation of exploration of an unfamiliar urban space, implies that even in presence of prior knowledge about the place no prior direct experience of it have taken place. This situation allows to trace the role of technical aid in the process of orientation and familiarizing oneself with the environment. Urban tourism, a specific domain of tourism, is chosen due to high informational density of urban environment—high concentration of both touristically relevant points of interest and holders of knowledge about them. This knowledge in the form of UGC, together with various kinds of located data, forms the content provided by mobile media.

Such applications are instruments which let people feel more comfortable in new places, thus allow them to maintain their habits and activities comfortably in the circumstances of changing geography and temporal structure of leisure and work. At the same time, they bring novelty to their users and make room for unexpected.

The label “tourism” is associated with a wide range of activities. It is a convenient umbrella term covering all kinds of visits—short- and long-term, related to leisure, business or anything else. It implies, however, finding oneself in an unfamiliar urban environment and lacking local knowledge.

Although tourism is chosen as a specific case, the results of the study are largely applicable to everyday life.

Results1) New understanding of landmarka) The number of mapped and described landmarks grows. Those of a smaller scale are included.Without the limitations of traditional guide books, where usually only the most significant of landmarks find a place, AR & locative media allow the pool of PoIs to be continuously expanded, filled with user-generated and other content. Its elements are searchable by location or otherwise.

b) Documented events acquire landmark status.While undocumented, an event only remains in the memories of its participants and observers. With documentation published, accessible and searchable, an event turns into a commonly recognized landmark.A lot of material related to large events, such as the Olympic Games or a big concert, used to be accessible. Events of a smaller scale and temporary projects are also documented, but the material is not always made available to the public. AR and locative media provide framework for the exchange of such information.

c) Personal landmarks attain public significance.Socially relevant user-generated content does not necessarily stem from common knowledge, but can be the product of individual phenomenological engagement with a space.A good place-related narrative or a report on a little-known fact of local life, discovered by a contributor, are the examples of such content, stemming from personal experience but socially significant.

2) Wayfinding supportAs an element of map-based and visual AR services, wayfinding assistence is particularly relevant for tourists who have no prior direct experience of the environment.Spatial knowledge is acquired through various experiences and processes. Its core elements involved in structuring and identifying the environment are:- declarative, or landmark knowledge, referring to knowledge of places;- procedural, or survey knowledge, related to paths and modes of moving between localities;- configurational, or survey—knowledge of the layout of a space and interrelationship of the elements within it.AR and locative media, in one way or another, meet the needs associated with all these types.

3) Route planning supportInfrastructural information, f.e. related to transportation or opening time, is location-dependent and highly contextual, and this makes it the matter of locative media. It is associated with the whole pool of located data, which thanks to local knowledge holders becomes findable and accessible.

4) Landmark information in form of facts and narrativesFacts are associated with informational needs of a visitor. Rich and varied factual content corresponds to the demand of personalized content appropriate for individual needs of a user.

Narratives meet the aspiration to experience the individual, distinct character of a place, and provide ready-made consumable meanings, already attached to it.

5) Facilitation of mediated contacts which serve informative purposeAccess to local information often implies some form of human-to-human contact. “Mediated” refers to such form of it, which does not necessarily result in a contact in a non-virtual space.Such communication is not necessarily personal in the sense of person-to-person conversation. Its personal character is associated with the access to personally submitted information. It can be unilateral. The focus in this case is on the informative function of communication.

6) Facilitation of non-mediated social experienceSocial dimension of tourist experience includes all kinds of activities which imply the presence of other people. Locative media, depending on the functionality of the application, make room for meaningful encounters.Moreover, people and their behaviour, practices, social institutions are also a tourist attraction. A wish to see how other people live is what drives us to see other places.While communication in all its complexity is the matter here, its informative function is relevant, as well, and is associated, among other things, with the value of procedural knowledge, or knowledge how, as distinguished from descriptive knowledge, or knowledge what. Direct contacts lead to shared experiences, and a holder of local procedural knowledge acts as a gatekeeper who opens the gates wide.

7) Narrative construction of memories and identityTravellers have always had stories to share. In line with the constructivist approach, through the act of formulation of and telling the story the history is written. In other words, events exist in the way we tell others about them.Stories are often bound to places. The publication of content of narrative nature thus contributes to individual experience of place and to personal sense-making. AR and locative media platforms provide such framework, which is convenient for both producing (publishing) and consuming narrative content.

8) Framework for documentationTravel experiences are documented using all common media—photography, video, text, audio. Such evidence is of personal relevance, as events are viewed as episodes of personal history.The evidence has also social relevance. F. e. when an experience is shared by a number of participants or is significant for others, the documentation will be used by others once published. Another example: using personal evidence as a part of place-making strategy within urban renewal activities, aiming at creating new image of the place.

9) Place-makingPlace-making is largely associated with public discourse and is an approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces which involves due consideration to the opinions of local community in the process of creating a common vision for the place. The publication of place-related narratives is a part of the strategy, aiming at creating the value and changing the collective image of a place.

Projects, services and applications mentioned in the studyStorypost, Weimar — Willis, Katharine S. “Wayfinding Situations.” Mediacity: Situations, Practices and Encounters. Eds. Franck Eckardt et al. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2008. 21–40.

EARS, Edinburgh — Bartie, Phil J., William A. Mackaness. “Development of a speech-based augmented reality system to support exploration of cityscape.” Transactions in GIS 10.1 (2006): 63–86.

PRISMA, San-Sebastian — Alzua-sorzabal, Aurkene, María Teresa Linaza and Marina Abad. “An experimental usability study for augmented reality technologies in the tourist sector.” Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2007: proceedings of the international conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2007. Eds. Marianna Sigala, Luisa Mich and Jamie Murphy. Springer, 2007. 231–241.

Automated Murmurs, Dublin — Freyne, Jill, Adam J. Brennan, Barry Smyth, Daragh Byrne, Alan F. Smeaton, Gareth J.F. Jones. “Automated Murmurs: The social mobile tourist application.” SMW'09—Social Mobile Web 2009. In conjunction with the SocialCom 2009—IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, 29–31 August 2009, Vancouver, Canada. 2009.

Google Latitude — http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/latitude/

Centrl — http://centrl.com/

Layar — http://layar.com/

Foursquare — http://foursquare.com/

Gowalla — http://gowalla.com/

Geomium — http://geomium.com/

Wikitude — http://www.wikitude.com/en/

Junaio — http://junaio.com/

Geocaching — http://geocaching.com/

City Murmur, Saint-Petersburg — http://citymurmur.ru/

Parascope, Malmö — http://www.unsworn.org/parascope/

Rotterdam AR system — http://med.hro.nl/padta/augmentedreality/NIOC/Augmented-Reality-Eindscriptie.pdf

Invisible Cities — www.christianmarcschmidt.com/invisiblecities

Yulia KulgavchukDept. of Communication, Business and IT

Roskilde University, Denmark

This presentation is based on the master thesis, submitted in 2011.

Comments and suggestions are welcomed.

meaugusta@gmail.com

Images used in the presentationp. 1: by Evan Leeson, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecstaticist/3423689554/

p. 2: by Mark Jensen, http://www.flickr.com/photos/markcph/5806334956

p. 3: by Ed Yourdon, http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/4776495397/

p. 4: by Carlos San Jose, http://www.flickr.com/photos/armadillo444/4757106912/

p. 5: by Chris Foulger, http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcmaster/5983640088/