In Support of City Exploration Ben Bedwell, Holger Schnädelbach, Steve Benford, Tom Rodden, Boriana Koleva Mixed Reality Laboratory University of Nottingham Computer Science Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB {bzb,hms,sdb,tar,bnk}@cs.nott.ac.uk 7B ABSTRACT The novel experience Anywhere allowed participants to explore an urban area, tying together information not normally available, new points of views and interaction embedded into physical places. Guided by ‘unseen’, on-the- street performers in an ongoing conversation maintained over mobile phones, they gained access to locative media and staged performances. Our analysis demonstrates how Anywhere produced engaging and uniquely personalised paths through a complex landscape of content, negotiated by the performer-participant pair around various conflicting constraints. We reflect our analysis through the lens of the key characteristics exhibited by mechanisms that support city exploration, before focussing on possible extensions to the technological support of teams of professional and amateur guides. 16B Author Keywords Locative experiences, city guide, performance 17B ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI): Group and Organization Interfaces: Collaborative Computing. 8BINTRODUCTION Exploring and understanding the city is an intriguing and rewarding experience for visitors and residents alike. Visitors seek out unfamiliar places; they look to understand a city’s history or find parts of the city associated with particular people or events. In doing so, they draw upon a host of information to support these activities. ‘Official’ content is provided by the city or authorities that is well researched and documented, and often sanctioned to provide a particular view on an environment. This is often supplemented by a growing raft of user-generated, frequently geo-tagged information such as tips and tricks, user generated reviews of restaurants and hotels as well as guides to the less well-visited quarters, normally considered ‘inaccessible’ to the tourist. In addition, the various stories associated with the city and its inhabitants, both factual and fictional, offer different perspectives on the same urban space. Overall, the above and the experiences and reactions of other visitors are often what make the experience of visiting a city memorable. Visitors also come across real challenges. Resources are often tied to particular locations dispersed throughout the city, some of which are not easily accessible. Moreover, the locations are shared, potentially requiring visitors to contend with others in order to undertake activities at a particular time and location. To enhance their experience of the city and to make the city more legible to them, visitors routinely turn to some form of guide. Two distinct strategies are used to improve access to the city: human guides and guide technologies. Human guides vary considerably in their knowledge and their relationship to the visitor. This could be a friend, longstanding or newly found, spontaneously or through a community based travel site [12]. It could also be a professional guide, trained to frame experiences in a particular way, matching the visitors’ preferences to their knowledge. In both cases, visitors will enjoy real personal engagement and may well see places that are not in guide- books, allowing access to the (otherwise) inaccessible. The simplest guide technologies used by people exploring a city are paper-based guide books and maps. They also offer adaptability in the way that they allow visitors to choose what they like to see and can provide in-depth information on particular subjects to allow informed decisions to be made. Audio guides, often using codes corresponding to locations, offer similar flexibility [14]. Positioning technologies (e.g. GPS, WIFI, RFID tagging) in combination with wireless networking have allowed the development of location based services (LBS) such as tourist guides [1,10]. By combining the preferences of the visitor, the experiences recorded by other visitors, and their location, recommender systems [4] are able to offer suggestions and support the visitors’ navigation as they traverse the city. Finally, guide technologies may also present dynamic information, e.g. opening hours and special events. Much more structured physical guidance and narrative (with correspondingly reduced risk and effort) can be expected from scripted, linear audio and video tours that take people on a defined path [9,16]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2009, April 4–9, 2009, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04...$5.00.