Locative Media Literature Review

DfIM Assignment 2: RADAR project -Developing a Literature Review

Overview

Locative media is a truly location specific medium. It can bring users out of the office or classroom and deliver the spatial qualities of information to where they have relevance (space specific). Not only does it refer to all the information in the physical location but to other contextual cues as well.

Many of the various locative media projects researched have concentrated on social interaction with a place and with technology and have a social critical or personal background.

The types of technology that enable locative media are; (GPS) Global Positioning Systems, laptop computers, Palm computers (PDA’s) Personal Digital Assistants, Mobile Phones, Bluetooth and Satellite Navigation Software.

Whilst these technologies are the catalysts for locative media, they are not the goal for the development of projects in this area of research. Rather;

"Locative media is many things: A new site for old discussions about the relationship of consciousness to place and other people. A framework within which to actively engage with, critique, and shape a rapid set of technological developments. A context within which to explore new and old models of communication, community and exchange. A name for the ambiguous shape of a rapidly deploying surveillance and control infrastructure." (Russell, 2004)

Context-aware computing represents a relatively new area of research. Context awareness means gathering information from the environment to provide a measure of what is currently going on around the user and the device. Activities and content that are particularly relevant to that environment can then be made available. Mobile devices are especially well suited to context-aware applications simply because they are available in
different contexts, and so can draw on those contexts to enhance the learning activity. Context-aware mobile devices can support learners by allowing a learner to maintain their attention on the world and by offering appropriate assistance when required.

The museum and gallery sector has been on the forefront of context-aware mobile computing by providing additional information about exhibits and displays based on the visitor’s location within them.
Objectives

The aims and objectives of this review are:
• To find out in what ways can locative media is being used at the moment to represent physical locations and provide contextual experience of space and culture.
• To see how the media can trigger real social and cultural interaction when linked to real places.
• To analyse previous papers and projects.
• To propose a basis for future research and development.

LOCATIVE MEDIA AS SOCIALISING AND SPATIALISING PRACTICES:
LEARNING FROM ARCHAEOLOGY (DRAFT)
Anne Galloway (Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University) and Matthew Ward (Dept. of Design, Goldsmiths College)

This research paper examines the nature of pervasive and locative media as emerging technologies and processes that promise to reconfigure our understandings and experiences of space and culture. They compare archaeology’s constitutive processes of collection, ordering and display against the problems found in mapping people and objects in space and time. Keywords used in the paper include - everyday life, context, locative, technology, design, hybridity, mapping and curation.

They state that when all we have are the fragmented remains of lived experience, how people, places, objects, events and activities relate in spaces and time becomes the primary means by which cultural knowledge and experience are reproduced and placed into context. Taking inspiration from archaeology’s approaches to understanding and representing what may very well be ineffable social/spatial experiences, the paper looks closely at socializing and specializing practices in archaeology and locative media.

In recent decades, the critical and reflexive eye of anthropology and archaeology has
been turned to the collection and representation of cultural ‘property’ in all forms.
Museums, both public and private, are understood to produce and engage a variety
of “histories, discourses and spectacles” and collections are seen to convey as much
about collector values as the cultures they ostensibly represent [1].

For any technological device to be ‘aware’ of its context--physical or otherwise—it has to be able to locate, classify, collect, store and use ‘relevant’ information, as well as to identify and discard or ignore ‘irrelevant’ information. If we imagine these devices and data as cultural artifacts, and servers and databases as cabinets and museums, then locative media begin to share many of the same interests and concerns as archaeology and anthropology.

Questions they suggest, for consideration with future research;
• The question of authorship compels us to look not just at who is currently able to create and use locative media, but at who will be able to re-create and re-use locative media in the future.
• The question of ownership requires us to be aware that most locative media projects require large databases and these data are subject to the same curatorial issues as any cultural collection.
• When it comes to creating and using locative media, we can evaluate the relations of production and consumption: Where does the technology originate? How is the project funded? Who gets to use these technologies to create cultural ‘content’ or artifacts? Who gets to set the rules of engagement? What are the power relations at play? What shape can resistance take?
• At stake in all these questions are relations between artists and corporate researchers, designers and users, subjects and objects, pasts and futures, material and immaterial, commodities and values. If locative media are ultimately understood as collections of cultural artifacts, what roles do they take in shaping personal identities, collective histories and values, political and economic interests around the world?

I found this an interesting read especially as it mentions cultural rights and museums (I’m looking at a way of bring museums out onto the streets) but I’m not entirely convinced when they state that all locative media projects, rely on some sort of collaboration between governments, universities, industries, and artists. Do they think that there is no independent thought in this area or that it all overlaps and no one can work in a vacuum?

DEPLOYING AND EVALUATING A LOCATION-AWARE SYSTEM
Harle, R. K. and Hopper, A. (2005)

Unlike many research papers in the area of Locative Media that are deployed on a small scale and evaluated technically, in this paper, the authors present their experience of deploying an indoor location system (the Bat System) over a larger area and running it for a period exceeding two years. A number of technical considerations are highlighted: a need to consider aesthetics throughout deployment, the disadvantages of specializing sensors for location only, the need for autonomous maintenance of the computational world model, the dangers in coinciding physical and symbolic boundaries, the need to design for space usage rather than space and the need to incorporate feedback mechanisms and power management.

The aim of this paper is to try and highlight the need to evaluate large-scale deployments of such systems both technically and through user studies. Historically, deployments of high precision indoor location systems have not involved large coverage areas due to the cost of instrumenting the environment. The most common approach is to instrument a single room, which then acts as a test bed for the location technology. However, this approach fails to represent a deployment from which usage characteristics can be reliably derived. Usage of such a room is likely to be sporadic and not representative of how users would use the space normally. In one attempt to address this, AT&T Research Cambridge and the University of Cambridge jointly developed the Bat system and deployed it over a greater area.

Some of the conclusions and guidelines that the researchers of this paper came to after studying people wear the Bat devices in the labs they worked in were;
• Design for space usage rather than physical space (some areas are just dead-zones and it can be a waste of time and equipment to monitor them).
• Beware the coincidence of physical and symbolic boundaries (have systems overlap at doorways to provide a transition).
• Incorporate autonomous maintenance
• Design for maximal signal penetration
• Beware false positives and false negatives (just because the Bat device can be seen it doesn’t necessarily mean the owner is with it)
• Include feedback capabilities.

This paper has also presented the results of surveying members of the laboratory that have access to Bats. The major highlights are:
• The majority (77.3%) feel comfortable wearing a 50g tag around their neck.
• Initial assignment of a location tag often results in a novelty period that typically lasts days.
• 42.1% now wear a Bat on a daily basis.
• The majority characterizes their Bat as useful or fun.
• Applications are crucial to a good deployment
• A pervasive application vicious cycle is evident, where users reject some applications because others do not use them.
• False negatives in tracking complicate location aware applications.
• Users differ in how they perceive and use the location-aware system, and distinct classifications are apparent.
• Location privacy is rarely a concern in the deployment environment.

I found this paper gave a good insight into a long-term lab tested project and highlighted a lot of problems that could be encountered. A small proportion of the test subjects stated that the cost of privacy was a factor of them not wearing the device all the time at work, which probably translates over to the public in general and their big brother is watching you mentality.

PARALLEL WORLDS: IMMERSION IN LOCATION-BASED EXPERIENCES
Josephine Reid, Erik Geelhoed, Richard Hull-Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Kirsten Cater, Ben Clayton-University of Bristol

Location aware technologies make possible new interactive experiences of situated drama and narrative. Riot! was developed by Hewlett Packard Labs, Mobile Bristol and two local writers Ralph Hoyte and Liz Crow. It was described as an interactive play for voices and set in Queen’s Square, a large Georgian public space in Bristol, England. It utilized hand-held computing technology and the Global Positioning System (GPS) to trigger audio files representing a riot that had occurred in the square in 1831. It was made available to the general public in a three-week long research trial. Participants were issued with a small backpack containing an iPAQ Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), GPS receiver and headphones.

The fact that the play is located in the square where the actual historical events had
taken place was important. It seemed to have more resonance and to matter
more to people who were from the local area. People began to look at a series of
familiar markers in the landscape with different eyes, the square was in this
sense familiar and yet unfamiliar.

The paper goes on to talk about immersion and how it has a strong affinity to the concept of flow where the sense of time and self are lost, and attention is completely focused on the current activity [2]. They observed that immersion seemed to be a transient state that can be fleeting or can last for several minutes. The circumstances that move people between immersive and non-immersive states are therefore an important consideration for future designs. In Riot the events that immersed people were when a powerful new sound started up, a familiar place was mentioned, a regional accent resonated, a familiar character was recognized or when a physical object in the present day could be related to the current event being described. Equally important is the transition out of immersion, which can be brought about either by the designed pauses in the narrative or through an unplanned interruption such as an event in the physical world or a system fault. If the structure and content of the narrative are not sufficiently engaging attention is lost much more easily.

They came to the conclusion at the end of the project that the stages of immersion identified in video games can be applied to location-based experiences but the prominence of the real work environment means that the immersed states are short with continual dipping between the parallel worlds of the digital and physical.

From reading this paper seems that using only audio failed to totally immerse people in the experience, and that having some visual feedback, in particular pictures of the square as it was in 1831 would help users make sense of the narrative. The lack of structure and the randomness of the sounds encountered in the square caused people to feel confused. Although this was a deliberate design to try and emulate the confusion of being in a riot, many people expressed dissatisfaction at not being able to make enough sense of what was going on. Will take this on board with my own work to make it as structured and understandable as possible.

INNER CITY LOCATIVE MEDIA: DESIGN AND EXPERIENCE OF A LOCATION-AWARE MOBILE NARRATIVE FOR THE DUBLIN LIBERTIES NEIGHBORHOOD
Valentina Nisi, Dr. Ian Oakley, and Dr. Mads Haahr

In this research paper the use of new digitally mediated narratives that makes use of mobile technology is investigated. It claims that an urban neighbourhood is the physical embodiment of a communities memories and history, and that location-aware mobile narrative systems have significant potential when applied to urban spaces, especially spaces of disadvantaged areas.

The narrative is delivered by using an evolving collection of historically inspired video stories adapted from written accounts of life in the deprived but culturally cohesive inner city area of Dublin, known as “the Liberties”. The stories are viewed on location-aware PDA’s and the aim of the project is to provide viewers with a nuanced and evocative sense of place as they walk the streets of the neighbourhood.

Their investigations seemed to indicate that presenting narratives taken from historical, literary, and word-of-mouth accounts of life set in a particular place to users situated and physically immersed in that same place provides a vivid and evocative experience that encapsulates something of the sense of place.

It was interesting to note that they stored the content on a SD card in the iPAQ for the basis of simplicity and reliability but used GPS to trigger the content. The technology seems to be moving along quickly enough now so that you would be able to stream the content over a wireless network so that anyone with a GPS enabled PDA could access the content used in the project. I regards to the user interface I would agree with some of the users that the icons used seem to clutter up the screen and make the map difficult to see. It would be useful to have a way of turning the icons on and off to aid visibility and user interaction.

MULTIMEDIA TOUR PROGRAMME AT TATE MODERN
Gillian Wilson, Tate Modern, United Kingdom

Tate Modern has been developing three different types of handheld media tours delivered wirelessly to PDA’s. A highlights tour designed to appeal to the 16-25 age group, a tour in British sign language designed for deaf people, and a collections tour that provides different levels of digital information about all artworks in the Collections displays. In the paper they go on to talk about their interpretative aims and discuss users opinions on interactive content such as texting and games, artists’ contributions, links between audio and visual, use of film clips, and provision of text-based information.

They have used their experience from people using low tech, object based activities which are used to add to people’s learning experience as to make sure that visitors attention is focused on the art work other than solely on the games they are playing, and applied these principles to the high tech multimedia tours.

In terms of navigational structure the interactive map provides a way of navigating through the gallery space, as does the select work option. The jukebox plays music which relates to works on display and Tate txt is a messaging function between individual PDAs. Gallery info provides information about other membership details, gallery events etc., as well as picture credits.

As this project is an extension of a previous pilot project they have been able to learn from earlier mistakes, and even though its only been a year they encountered fewer technical problems, which just goes to show how fast the technology is developing. It was interesting to note that the content was developed in Macromedia Flash, version 6 so that they had total control of the look and feel of the content and interface. Now that Flash is on version 8 and version 9 is well into development you should be able to incorporate more video files and the sign language videos should run a lot smoother if incorporated with stronger PDA processors and better network connectivity.

Reference/ Bibliography

[1] D. J. Sherman and I. Rogoff (eds.), Museum culture: histories, discourses,
spectacles, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1994)
[2] Czsentmihalyi M. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience. Harper Perennial, 1990.

Russell, Ben (2004): Transcultural Media Online Reader Introduction, http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?intro;russell
[Accessed on 28/10/06]

Anne Galloway, Carleton Matthew Ward. (2005). Locative Media As Socialising And Spatialising Practices: Learning From Archeology [online].
Available from http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/papers/galloway_ward_draft.pdf
[Accessed 03/10/6]

Harle, R. K. and Hopper, A. (2005). Deploying and Evaluating a Location-Aware Systems. In: Proceedings of the Mobisys 2005. [online].
Available from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/DTG/~rkh23/pubs/mobisys2005.pdf
[Accessed on 04/11/06]

Josephine Reid, Erik Geelhoed, Richard Hull-Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Kirsten Cater, Ben Clayton-University of Bristol. Parallel Worlds: Immersion in location-based experiences. [online].
Available from http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Publications/Papers/2000260.pdf
[Accessed on 07/11/06]

Valentina Nisi, Dr. Ian Oakley, and Dr. Mads Haahr . Inner City Locative Media:
Design and Experience of a Location-Aware Mobile Narrative for the Dublin Liberties Neighbourhood. [online].
Available from http://mf.media.mit.edu/pubs/journal/InnerCity.pdf
[Accessed on 10/11/06]

Gillian Wilson, Tate Modern, UK .Multimedia Tour Programme at Tate Modern [online]
Available from. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/papers/wilson/wilson.html
[Accessed on 20/11/06]