A real-world study of an audio-tactile tourist guide

Abstract

This paper reports on the in-context evaluation of an audiotactile interactive tourist guide -one test was done in a medieval city center, and the other was done at an archaeological site. The activity theory framework was used as a perspective to guide design, field-study and analysis. The evaluation shows that the guide allows users to experience an augmented reality, while keeping the environment in focus (in contrast with the common key-hole like experience that onscreen augmented reality generates). The evaluation also confirms the usefulness of extending the vibrational feedback to convey also distance information as well as directional information.

The Time Machine – An Inclusive Tourist Guide Application Supporting Exploration

“…The application in general is seen to be appreciated by the test users, but there is also room for improvement. The guiding was seen to be working well also for users with visual impairments (previous tests [18] had shown this to be the case for elderly sighted users). The scanning/exploration was well liked, but improvements are needed to be able to better deal with occlusion and close lying objects.…”

“…Due to the exploratory usage the sounds were no longer part of a trail, and since they were separate from the POIs, there was no natural connection between the sounds you heard while exploring and the goal that you had chosen. Participants in the city were curious about the sounds, and wanted to be able to explore the sounds and understand what they were and why they were there (in the earlier tests [18] where the sounds were part of a trail this had not been a problem since the sounds connected to the content of the trail).…”

“…PointNav [5] gives both orientation and navigation support through vibrations and speech feedback. More recent work include the NiviNavi inclusive audio game [7] and the TimeMachine [18] which reports on an inclusive tourist application making use of haptic and auditory information. In DigiGraff [9] it is explored how location based information can be used in a more social setting.…”

“…We report the application design and preliminary results from evaluations in a city environment. This article extends on [18] by looking at explorative usage. The application has also been tested in rural/hiking environments but these tests lie outside the scope of the present paper.…”

HaptiMoto

“…Pedestrian navigation systems are designed to accommodate various pedestrian types, such as tourists in unfamiliar envi ronments [43,58], soldiers in sensitive environments [13,17,18], and vision-impaired individuals in bustling environ ments [27,39], whom use tactile alerts, smartphone vibration alerts, or wearable devices such as vibrotactile belts and vests.…”