‘George Square’ screenshot, showing a map that displays each user’s location (1), thumbnail photos (2), recommended locations, web pages (3) and photos (4), and each user’s recommendation list (5).

George Square presentation (15 MB PDF).

We ran an extensive trial of the system in George Square in Glasgow, studying how the system could support shared visits. In this trial one visitor walked around the square looking at different attractions in the square, while a second visitor sat indoors at a laptop computer. Both visitors could communicate through our system, talking, taking photographs and browsing the web.

System trial - visitor indoors and visitor ouside in the square

In these trials the map was used as a resource for understanding the context of others, photographs were a resource for conversation between users, and the recommendations supported talk about the different places in the square. Importantly, the system provided not only support for collaboration, but also for the sociable activities of a visit, such as talking around photographs and city features.

GS Sytem on PDA

With a view to make the George Square system more accessible to the public we have developed a more flexible pocket pc version of the system.

The following snapshots show the PDA version of the system.

GSQ on a PDA	A closer look at recommendations
Tap on a picture icon	A window pops up with the picture - click on picture to make it go.

Map Services

To increase scalability, web services have been implemented to serve maps relevant to a particular GPS position. The webservices use a map database (OS Mastermap and NTF files). The maps are generated on the fly and can be downloaded by the application.

Annotation and Marking

One of the main issues which hampers the deployment of such a system is the difficulty in creating recommendations
and marking areas. We have therefore developed a GSQ editor which allows the authoring of recommendations (buildings, URLs and pictures). Both location and view volume corresponding to a particular picture can be edited.

To further help with marking areas, we suggest regions on the map by retrieving nearby physical features from a repository of real map features (OS Mastermap).

The 3 editing buttons.	Buildings highlighted as one moves.
Building polygons fetched on the fly from map database

Visibility filtering

We have extended the George Square system to apply visibility processing to prioritize recommendation that are probably visible to the user.
By using information about real world buildings and features, the certainty that a particular recommendation is visible is computed. This in turn is used to provide a filtered recommendation service which has the benefit of presenting location and context sensitive information.

    
The snapshot on the left shows the unfiltered recommendations, whereas the one on the right is filtered.

C# version of GS System

Finally we have ported some of the features of the GS system for performance reasons - making it even better.

Selecting the map to load	Recommendations
Tap on a picture icon and it shows in an embedded browser

B. Barry, M. Chalmers, M. Bell, I. MacColl, M. Hall, P. Rudman (2005) Sharing the square: collaborative visiting in the city streets. In: Proceedings of chi 2005, alt.chi

The source code for George Square may be downloaded here.