Technologies & Support:

• Mobile phone/PDA enabled with a colour screen and WAP, blue-tooth enabled;
• GPS mobile hand-held device;
• Supported by: a website and database (for archive up-load and download);
• Additional technologies; google earth, google maps

Description:

• Visitors collaborate to access and create a narrative skin within the outdoor environment of the Park. A series of narrative guides have been created to augment the trail walk in the Park. Participants will choose from guides such as orientation & viewpoints; animals and wildlife; trees and plant life; geology; history; aboriginal and children’s narratives that they will access from the Park Walk website. They will download their chosen guide or guides to their cellphone prior to their walk. With the assistance of a mobile GPS device, and both conventional and topographic and points of interest maps, (as well as Google Earth and Google Maps images) they will be able to access narrative caches along the trail, to read facts, hear stories, and view images attached to specific locations along the trail. Participants will be encouraged to capture their own images, audio and video related to the narrative caches and specified GPS locations that correspond with special points of interest along the trail. Children might compete to find the caches and to collect virtual souvenirs of their walk.
  
  At the end of the walk, participants will then be enabled to add their own stories, images, photos, audio and video, via upload from their cellphones to the Park Walk website. Participants uploads would be submitted to an editorial review, and if chosen for addition to the growing Park Walk archive, would be added to the available download experience. Each cache would have a size limit attached to it, so that once the cache is completed that site would become a 'crystal'. This could add a competitive aspect to the Park Walk activity, with users competing to find sites and to add their best stuff before the site 'crystallizes'. Participants would be given templates in order to use their own data as well as data from the archive to design a Park Walk album, as a souvenir of their walk in the park.

Method:

• We will be working on the core research questions, and through an iterative and participatory method, we will collaborate to do embodied and location-specific research to find out more about how we might like to use mobile technology to enhance our experience of an urban park.

Activities:

• Through experiencing a walk in the Park at High Park in downtown Toronto:

• Capturing images, video and audio from our experience
• Analysing our observations and content capture in order to create use/case scenarios
• Interfaces for both the phone and the web; populate interfaces with content
• Create technical specs for the experience
• Observing and documenting all of these these activities
• Think about and look at mapping the experience

Goals:

• To discover how participants use mobile & gps technology in a park walk experience;
• To discover and document what participants wish to take away, leave behind and share within an urban park walk experience
• To capture content and design interfaces that reflect our findings
• To create a use/case scenario for the park walk experience
• To approach and think about a technical specification

Anticipated Outcomes:

• Content capture materials (images, audio, video)
• Interface design for the web and for the cellphone
• To load content, (maps, images, audio, video) to the phone interface
• To load content, (maps, images, audio, video) to the web interface
• Documentation of the processes

Map on a phone - Questions:

• Where are the hotspots?
• How do I figure out where I am on this map?
• I want to put some hotspots on the map, what are the GPS co-ordinates, how do I put these on the map?
• What is the interaction of co-ordinating the map with your location on the map - does your icon follow you or do you follow the icon?
• Do you want the map to zoom?