Evaluating automatically generated location-based stories for tourists

Abstract

Tourism provides over six percent of the world's gross domestic product. As a result, there have been many efforts to use technology to improve the tourist's experience via mobile tour guide systems. One key bottleneck in such location-based systems is content development; existing systems either provide trivial information at a global scale or present quality narratives but at an extremely local scale. The primary reason for this dichotomy is that, although good narrative content is more educationally effective (and more entertaining) than a stream of simple, disconnected facts, it is time-intensive and expensive to develop. However, the WikEar system uses narrative theory-informed data mining methodologies in an effort to produce high-quality narrative content for any location on Earth. It allows tourists to interact with these narratives using their camera-enabled cell phones and an innovative interface designed around a magic lens and paper map metaphor. In this paper, we describe a first evaluation of these narratives and the WikEar interface, which reported promising, but not conclusive, results. We also present ideas for future work that will use this feedback to improve the narratives.

Designing for smart cities

“…However, none of these works seems to deeply connect personal memories to urban spaces for strengthening the bond between citizens and city environments. Other studies investigated the connection between urban environments and storytelling, bonding spaces with narrative, for enriching experience to users on the move [7], favoring the formation of a sense of place by layering historical background on top of the physical environment [4], or improving the tourist experience [8]. However, these works are focused on providing cultural, historical or fictional narratives to users, without leveraging the power of memories in transforming the meanings associated to a space.…”

Supporting the Reader in the Wild

“…Or it may be possible to automatically generate stories to match a tourist's itinerary: [29] describes one such prototype system that creates educational, narrative audio tours based on facts about the location mined from Wikipedia.…”

Intel Collaborative Research Institute - Sustainable Connected Cities

“…Other examples (looking at different perspectives on this problem) are described in [16,17]. In many mid-to large-sized cities public maps are ubiquitous.…”