A historical audio and video guidebook for an Android smartphone/tablet John Reid September 2011 Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree
Introduction 1.1Background and Context
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- 1.2Scope and Objectives
- 1.3Achievements
1Introduction1.1Background and ContextThe idea to write this application came from reading a series of books about Edinburgh that were written in 1880 with interesting drawings and descriptions of the old city. Using a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet seemed an ideal way to present this content since they are portable, lightweight and many have high quality, high resolution screens. Indeed, with the continued growth of mobile applications, a guidebook running on these devices has several advantages over normal paper based or audio guidebooks; many users already have a mobile device capable of running these applications, the content itself can be updated more easily and typically the cost of buying these applications is lower (or free) than a paper based equivalent. In addition to this, a large amount of content can be stored on the devices and many mobile devices have the ability to calculate and display the user’s current location. It was discovered that the majority of existing historical guidebook applications about Edinburgh had little or no accessibility features and few contained historical maps. Additionally, few historical guidebooks contained both video and audio multimedia content and none were available for the Android platform. During the development of the application some of the tour guides at Edinburgh castle were consulted and it lead to the idea of the geolocking feature that could stop a guidebook working outside a given location. Another feature considered important was the ability to change the language quickly and easily so a tour guide could show content to a tourist in their language. The chapter number could also be used to tie in with the audio tour guide markers at a given site. From a tourism point of view, the ability to geolock the guidebooks and to display the user’s position on a detailed historical map could encourage people to visit the towns and cities covered by the books. To make the content more interesting, an additional book called “Lost Edinburgh” was also used after receiving permission from the publisher to use text and images from it. Although there was no definite client who suggested the project, there were definite project objectives and it was hoped that the application could be placed onto the Android marketplace after the project was completed. The application was called “HGuide” standing for “Historical Guidebook”.
The following objectives were identified:
As listed above, one of the objectives was to make the application user friendly and accessible (to as wide a range of users as possible). Since the application could be used by tourists, it was important that it should support more than one language and that this language could be easily changed. The application should also support various features for people who were visually impaired, so the use of large buttons, changeable fonts, sign language videos and high contrast text to better make out characters were considered to be worthwhile additions to make. As it may be used by older people and those not familiar with mobile devices, one of the objectives was to make the application as easy to use as possible. To make the application more responsive, all the content was to be held locally on the device (to avoid potentially long and costly downloads) and so no Internet connection was required to run the application. Two guidebooks were written to test it; one was called “Old Edinburgh” and the other called “Edinburgh Castle”. Creating two guidebooks also helped to check how easy it was for a user to change guidebooks in the application. During the requirements stage, careful consideration was given to the different directions that the application could take; it could be used either as a standard downloadable application from the Android marketplace or as a bespoke tour guide application for a particular tourist location (especially when used on an Android tablet) so tour guides could show information visually rather than carrying around a folder. In this latter regard, the use of sign language videos and multi-language support would be of benefit. The ability of the application to change the content based on the weather conditions was added to help make the application more personal. At the time of writing, it was not designed to list things to do in an area or present walking tours (although this would be easy to achieve if desired). 1.3AchievementsAll of the main objectives were achieved within the specified time of the project. An Android application was successfully created and this was trialled on three groups of users that covered a wide range of abilities and experience. Based on the feedback given in the user trial’s questionnaire, it was believed that the application achieved the major objectives and design goals of the project of creating an ease of use and professional looking application. Directory: courses -> ITNP99 -> PastDissertations -> 2010-2011 -> Dissertations courses -> Ieor 4600 Mixed-Integer Rounding Inequalities courses -> San José State University Social Science/Psychology Psych 175, Management Psychology, Section 1, Spring 2014 courses -> Kennan's Telegram (Excerpt) courses -> The university of british columbia courses -> A hurricane track density function and empirical orthogonal function approach to predicting seasonal hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin Elinor Keith April 17, 2007 Abstract courses -> Cover page need figure & title by Proposed Table of Contents courses -> Objectives courses -> Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog Download 239.28 Kb. Share with your friends:
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