UMIC - Tourist Szenario
Excellence Cluster “Communication, Media, and Mobility”Application Scenario “Tourism”
Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers
Media Computing Group, RWTH Aachen University
http://media.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/borchers.html
Version 1 (June 21, 2005)
A Story
Adam Smith, age 45, from Manchester is visiting Paris with his wife Lisa for a week. As they go out to explore the neighborhood of their hotel on the day of their arrival, they wonder how far they are from any interesting sights. As usual, they had wanted to really plan their trip ahead this time, but somehow didn’t quite get around to it. Adam glances at the sheet of e-paper the hotel concierge handed them on their way out. It’s a little thicker than a sheet of cardboard, and its battery will last them through the week if they don’t overdo using it. The sheet is cheap enough to be disposable; on their last trip to Rome they forgot to return one of these along with the electronic door key card, but nobody complained.
The map on the sheet shows their hotel, their own current location and direction they’re facing, nearby streets, and a few buildings that appear to be interesting. But the non-realistic map doesn’t help Adam to orient himself since the real environment where they stand right now looks very different—there’s a big construction site here now—, and since he doesn’t know whether that nearby church is really of interest to them.
He switches to satellite mode, and the map transforms into a realistic satellite view of their current location. The resolution is high enough to see people in the streets, and the image is from the most recent satellite flyovers over that area of Paris. It shows the new construction site and also reveals that the church, easily found because it’s labeled on an overlay layer, has a nice, shady park with large trees around it. Tapping on the church reveals a 3D model and some general information on it. It’s an original medieval building—just what they’re interested in—, and there will be a last tour of the day at 5pm. Adam is unsure if the tour will be in English since their French is quite rusty, so he videocalls the hotel concierge and asks her to check with the church and put in a booking for them if there is an English guide available.
The concierce opens an additional videocall to the church and serves as a translator between Adam and the church assistant. The booking is successful, and Adam and Lisa follow the trail on the e-paper map. They get to the church just in time to join the tour, making for a wonderful end to their first day in Paris.
Technology
The scenario above requires highspeed wireless mobile access as outlined in the “wireless DSL/Gbit” goals of this excellence cluster. It shows an application that is not possible with today’s technologies because of the required multimedia data streaming rates. High-resolution satellite imagery that is updated regularly and streamed onto the device on demand creates enormous data rates, and the multiparty videocall feature will require streaming video support. Both of these benefit greatly from increased resolution, compressed-image quality and frame rates. An interesting related satellite imagery project is Keyhole (http://www.keyhole.com/) that was recently acquired by Google to enhance their already well-established satellite maps feature (http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=San+Francisco,+CA, click on Satellite button at the top right).
The scenario also requires development of new interface hardware and periphery; the cheap e-paper is still futuristic, but rollout paper-like diplays are a commercial reality today (see, for example, Philips’ Polymer Vision, http://www.polymervision.com/). Making the paper touch-sensitive and adding a camera and microphone are additional requirements. This creates challenges both on the level of designing new physical devices (including wearable computing), and on the level of the software user interface, interactive 3D computer graphics and new modes of human-computer interaction.
Finally, another prerequisite is precision location sensing in a small form factor, and working inside buildings as well as outdoors. A good example of the current state of the art for this is Placelab’s GSM-based software-only location sensing solution (http://www.placelab.org/).