“LiveGuide: An Online Guided Tour” Goes Live

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk

After many months of development, I am pleased to announce that my latest project – “LiveGuide” – is finally online.

 

LiveGuide is a new design of online tour, intended to more closely mimic the features of a real world guided tour of a location thank traditional virtual tours.  In particular, LiveGuide focusses on the narrative and interactive elements of a live tour to deliver a more complete experience for the online tourist.

 

In the course of researching this project, it became apparent that there is a tendency when communicating factual information online to using hypertext to provide a lot of the contextualization for the information.  However, in the real world, this contextualization is often supplied by narrative – as in a guided tour.  LiveGuide is an experiment in combining the functionality and flexibility of hypertext and the stricter structure of a narrative.  The tour has a defined tour route, around which the narrative is structured, but there are also opportunities to pause at particular locations and select from a range of options so one can explore the space on a thematic basis.  This balances the expectations of online users – who are used to the freedom of hypertext – with the need for narrative to make sense of the space in context.

The tour design also includes a live chatbot, named Tour Guide, who is programmed to answer any questions the tourist may have during the course of the tour.  The training for this is ongoing, so I am able to review its responses and improve the quality of its comments the more people interact with it.  The bot is also able to engage in conversation, as would a real tour guide, to enhance the user’s personal experience of the tour.

 

The tour design – featuring a 35 minute tour of the World Heritage City of Bath – is currently on show here.  You will require headphones or speakers to listen to the tour and the latest version of Flash Player.  This is a test version of the design, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA in Creative Writing & New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester.  I would be interested to hear about people’s experiences/reactions when taking the tour and invite comments either on this blog post or by email to: custard@custardether.co.uk.

translating reality into the virtual

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is really quite odd to consider what elements of real life people choose to translate into their virtual existence on the Internet.

 

We have translated the “Christmas card” – a symbol of former friendship and regard – into the badge of appearing on someone’s “friends” list, receiving cursory updates and greetings from acquaintances/former friends who are no longer part of our current lives via tools like Facebook.

 

We have taken advertising with us into the virtual world, but done away with ad breaks, which force us away from the box to make a cup of tea.

 

We have translated our forums for chat – our coffee bars and our high school reunions – but we have not translated our quiet spaces to ponder.  The Internet is a doing place, afterall…

 

The reason I have come to consider this odd division of things we have translated and things we have not is because I am currently trying to improve on a standard online system by translating real world values into a virtual format.

 

I am trying to create an online tour.  If you look at most online tours, they can look pretty neat… you can usually swivel round a 360^o picture until you feel sick and click on a few hotspots to get some information in the form of text.  No problem there!  A virtual equivalent of a real world activity – taking a look around a place and getting some contextual information about it…

 

But is that what a real, live-guided tour does?

 

Very often, we get so wrapped up in the idea that our lives have a virtual parallel dimension that we forget to compare the virtual with the reality to see whether we are really achieving this dream.

 

In the case of virtual tours, they generally miss out so much of what a real tour guide is doing that aside from giving a visual experience of a place, they can hardly be said to be “guides” at all. 

 

I analysed the role of a tour guide and compared this with a survey of the variety of virtual tour variations available.  I was surprised by the number of recommendations I could make for improving existing standards and concepts of “virtual tours” based on this comparison.  It was almost as if the designers and standard setters, whoever they may be, had devised a way of doing a really cool thing, called it a tour, but never really thought about what a real tour does at all. 

This sounds like a harsh analysis, but when I started to look deeper, I found that this was often the case.  Virtual equivalents to reality are being developed all the time without much reference to the actual reality that they are trying to represent. 

 

Sometimes this is a good thing.  We can improve upon the reality we have in our virtual world in a kind of utopian fashion.

 

But in other ways we risk missing out skills in our new world which would enable and facilitate users greatly.  The skill that the virtual tours miss out is narrative – none of them provide you with an overall narrative for the place they are exploring in the way a real tour guide would, and so we have a virtual world where spaces – physical or otherwise – are described with nuggets of information and connected by hyperlinks, rather than being connected by a narrative that could enhance understanding and contextualise the information.  It is almost as if the virtual world is a stripped down version of reality in this sense: dispensing with the subtleties of connections whilst claiming to make links and connections between things clearer. 

 

If this is the world we are supposed to be bringing storytelling into, we need to be thinking not just about places we can locate stories, but rather the whole attitude and design of this virtual reality and how it could be altered to enable storytelling in all its forms – just like the real world does.  Basically, we need to think more about how and what we are translating into our virtual realm from our real world, and how it all hangs together, rather than just trying to blindly create a utopian equivalent in flat pack form.

the strangeness of this side of the pond

Where else in the world would they advertise a version of Monopoly that uses credit cards instead of cash? Or have tanks of liquid nitrogen standing innocently on street corners? Or pelican crossings that make a “cuckoo” sound as you cross? In America – of course!

Very strange. Possibly too strange for this tired little grockle mind. I thought I would share this strangeness anyway…

a grockle in new york

Well, I have to say, it finally got to me: the grockle tendency which inhabits all of us when we travel. I have the camera, the hat, the armful of leaflets, the suncream that smells of dulux… all one really needs to be a tourist. A grockle, as those in the West Country might say.

I should now really do the new-media-tourist thing and blog about the exciting things I have seen and done – including all recommendations and links etc. During the Women, Business & Blogging conference, Jess spoke about how blogs are often used as a kind of human filter for all the stuff that is out there. I did not really appreciate this use of blogs until moving to Word Press, which provides me with far more stats about my readers and how they get here. People are out there looking for things: blogs provide human summaries of those things through experience and opinion.

So, here are my brief experiences and opinions following my visit to New York over the last week – in true web 2.0 grockle style!

The Down Town Tour:

I am a bad person to review any tour, as I become a profession-snob as soon as someone else takes the microphone. Our open top tour of Down Town New York took far longer than planned due to UN week traffic and included two tour guides. The first really wanted everyone off the bus at the stop at which we boarded. He proceeded to sit behind us, rambling in quick-time-new-york tones about people and ball players we had never heard of, whilst pointing out random buildings which we had already passed. The second guide was better, but really only gave soundbites of information whilst repeatedly reminding us of his name, the driver’s name, safety and tips.

See? Profession-snob! No mention of the route of the tour, the sites we took in or anything! I will restrain myself.

The down town tour included Times Square, China Town (where we saw this great Macky D’s), Greenwich Village, Wall Street (where other grockles were taking pictures of each other at the bull’s behind :S), Diamond District, Garment District… basically, all the accessible areas of lower Manhatten. Diversion and traffic plagues the bus as UN diplomats moved around the city, but otherwise it was good to see so much from up high without the stress of people and cabs.

Ellis Island/Statue of Liberty/Harbour Cruise:

All of the above in one go. This trip was at the request of my youngest sister to help with her A Level courses. Unfortunately, she went round like death all morning having drugged up on travel-sickness medication. Sorry, I mean “meds” – must get with the lingo!

We decided not to get off at boat at the Statue of Liberty, as we got plenty of photos from the approach. Ellis Island was quite another matter. A free museum on the island chronicles immigration to the US through NY, particularly those experiences relating to the people who were checked into the country through the facilities at Ellis Island. I could certainly have spent a while day at the museum – it covers social history, immigration patterns across the world… all sorts! Not a place to go with any person who does not like museums though – speaketh bitter experience here

Wicked (@ The Gershwin Theatre, Broadway):

FANTASTIC show! Want to go again already! The soundtrack CD (currently playing) has been providing one of my main distractions from constructive thought ever since (as I don’t appear to be able to think and listen to lyrics at the same time). Some of the numbers were much more musically complex than one would expect in a musical, but the storyline was very clever and the light show extremely effective. I came away desparately wanting to write something with that much passion. Everyone should go see it!

Bodies:

I pretty much rail-roaded my sisters into accompanying me to this exhibition. I had to study photographs from it as prompts in a poetry class once, and despite the initial repulsion which affected me at that time (when it was still very controversial) I couldn’t help myself wanting to see it in the flash, so to speak.

The exhibition consists of models made from human bodies, using a technique involving polymers and acids. The idea was to de-construct the human body and show our inner workings – the way the public dissections did during the renaissance – making anatomy more real and tangible than mere textbook diagrams. The ones created by injecting a red polymer into the blood vessels of donated bodies, then removing the flesh to leave a cost of the circulatory system were actually extremely beautiful. I think I will blog about this separately on another occasion, as there is so much more I could say….

Night Tour:

Another open top tour, which took us around part of the down town loop and then across to Brooklyn to see the lights of the Manhatten skyline. The guide was much better and the views stunning – although I discovered that my night photography skills leave much to be desired. Coming across the Manhatten Bridge on an open top was much like riding a rollercoaster – the side of the bus was very close to the edge of the bridge, with the associated sheer drop on the other side. My hair was a little wind-frizzled by the end, but it was definitely worth it.

Uptown Tour:

As if I had not spent enough time on an open top by this stage (is it possible to spend too long on an open top?) I had to go one last tour, which took us Uptown through Harlaam, Columbia University and round Central park. This featured the best guide of the lot, who had quite a dry sense of humour and attitude towards politics (“we don’t go to war under false pretences anymore, of course”). He gave the most informative tour I have heard in a good while – including the background to Hell’s Kitchen, the details of the project to build the largest stone cathedral in the world (currently ongoing since the 1800’s) and how Ella Fitzgerald started out in the Apollo Theatre. My only criticism was that he was evidently a tape recorder: if he got distracted or interrupted, he had to go back to the beginning of his story and repeat it word-for-word, intonation and everything. You know what though? I actually didn’t mind!

Macy’s/Times Square:

Several trips were made to both Macy’s and Times Square during our stay. The highlight of Macy’s (for me) was the wooden escalators towards the top of the building. Apparently these are not permitted in the UK any more, following the Kings Cross fire in the London Underground. Using the ones in Macy’s felt like stepping into a Terry Pratchett novel – using something inherently modern, presented in a medieval way. Times Square was just a mass of lights and advertisements – fun, but crowded. As Forest Gump would say, “that’s all I have to say about that”… except that they did have a restaurant called Bubba Gump Shrimps!

So, there you have it: a potted account of our trip to the Big Apple, just in case you were interested!