As mobile phones and computers become more complex, the range of media that affect our experiences of cities has expanded. What makes a city meaningful to us is not just its bricks and mortar, but the texts we read, people we talk to and experiences we have. Maps, conversations and images of a city all influences our activity and enjoyment. City focuses on bridging or blurring the boundaries between these different media. The systems we build mix local interactions and remote collaboration, using ubicomp technology, digital maps, virtual environments and hypermedia.

Our research includes ethnographic studies of city visitors (Brown and Chalmers, 2003), experimental mixed reality systems (Brown et al., 2003), collaborative ubicomp technologies (Brown et al., 2005) and conceptual work (Chalmers and Galani, 2004), underlying our designs.

We have developed a number of systems from this work: the lighthouse system experimented with supporting collaborative mixed reality in a museum, and more recently the George Square system looked at collaborative tourism outdoors in the city. City has also experimented with revealing hidden information about the streets, such as pollution in environmental George Square (EGS).

Brown, B., and Chalmers, M. (2003) Tourism and mobile technology. In: K. Kuutti, E. H. Karsten et al. (Eds.), ECSCW 2003: Proceedings of the eigth european conference on computer supported cooperative work, Helsinki, Finland, pp. 335–355, Dordrecht: Klewer Academic Press.

Barry Brown, Ian MacColl, Matthew Chalmers, Areti Galani, Cliff Randell, Anthony Steed (2003) Lessons from the lighthouse: Collaboration in a shared mixed reality system. In: Proceedings of CHI 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, pp. 577–585, ACM Press.

Matthew Chalmers and Areti Galani (2004) Seamful Interweaving: Heterogeneity in the Theory and Design of Interactive Systems. In: Proceedings of DIS 2004, pp. 243–252.