A mobile tourist guide is a software application with an intuitive interface, that provides users with multimedia information when and where needed during their visit to museums, city centres, parks, and so forth. Such an application runs on PDA-type terminals or on cellular phones, and could be augmented with GPRS (general packet radio service), GPS (global positioning system), and Bluetooth wireless technology. The guide allows tourists to plan routes according to preferences and ambient conditions (weather, timetables, sites of special interest, etc).
Published in Chapter:
Widely Usable User Interfaces on Mobile Devices with RFID
Francesco Bellotti (University of Genoa, Italy), Riccardo Berta (University of Genoa, Italy), Alessandro De Gloria (University of Genoa, Italy), and Massimiliano Margarone (University of Genoa, Italy)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-871-0.ch039
Abstract
Diffusion of radio frequency identification (RFID) promises to boost the added value of assistive technologies for mobile users. Visually impaired people may benefit from RFID-based applications that support users in maintaining “spatial orientation” (Mann, 2004) through provision of information on where they are, and a description of what lies in their surroundings. To investigate this issue, we have integrated our development tool for mobile device, (namely: MADE, Bellotti, Berta, De Gloria, & Margarone, 2003), with a complete support for RFID tag detection, and implemented an RFID-enabled location-aware tour-guide. We have evaluated the guide in an ecological context (fully operational application, real users, real context of use (Abowd & Mynatt, 2000)) during the EuroFlora 2006 international exhibition (EuroFlora). In this chapter, we describe the MADE enhancement to support RFID-based applications, present the main concepts of the interaction modalities we have designed in order to support visually impaired users, and discuss results from our field experience.