Exhibitions
EdFest 2005 / 2006
Setting
Every August the city of Edinburgh in Scotland turns into the Festival City, hosting a large number of events, such as the International Arts Festival, the International Book Festival, the International Jazz & Blues Festival, the International Film Festival, the Festival Fringe and the famous Military Tattoo. The various festivals cover a broad variety of cultural areas such as theatre, art, music, dance, cinematography, literature and many more. They attract thousands of tourists, visitors and local residents every year.
Navigation, orientation and planning can become a serious problem, especially for foreigners. Most of the festivals take place at multiple venues. There are dozens of events every day, including street shows as well as official events. And of course, there are beautiful parks, shops, pubs, restaurants, cafes, bars etc. The aim of this project is to develop a prototype application for the support of a visit to the Edinburgh festivals, based on ubiquitous and mobile information environments. The focus lies on context-aware presentation of information and services through various channels, capturing of personalised information and collaboration between multiple visitors.
The EdFest System
One of the major challenges of mobile data management is how to support interaction for users on the move. Most research projects focus on small mobile devices such as phones and PDAs and yet it is accepted that these are less than ideal for information systems of any complexity.
The focus of EdFest 2005 was to investigate the use of interactive paper documents coupled with speech output for access to Fringe Festival information. Users were supplied with a digital pen, an earpiece and a set of interactive paper documents that included an event brochure, a map and a bookmark. The three documents were designed to serve some useful purpose without access to the digital system and could be used independently of each other, although some advanced services such as ticket reservations involved more than one document. Results are delivered to the user via a text-to-speech engine. The user can also use the digital pen to capture their hand-written comments on events.
The EdFest 2005 system was tested in Edinburgh during the week of 15-19 August 2005. In addition to carrying out user studies with tourists, the Fringe organisers kindly offered us space in their e-ticket village on Princes Street to demonstrate the system.
Project Web Page
Generosa Enterprise
The project
The project Generosa Enterprise offer to visitors a good view of the area although not from the top of the mountain. Visitors can take part of an interactive game which has been designed by the artist Curt Walter Tannhäuser and the Global Information Systems group from ETH Zurich. The game will take them along a journey where they can experience the world of the Monte Generoso combining art, science and latest IT technology.
The worlds of air, water, earth and fauna at the Monte Generoso have been the topic of various research projects. A database contains all the information in the form of movies, photographs, sound clips, german and italian texts as well as pieces of art and scientific research results. The visitors should give free rein to their creativity in interweaving digital information with an empty sheet of paper resulting in a piecing together of information about the mountain.
How it works
Several players can draw paintings and write texts with a special pen on an empty A4 paper sheet. The paper is covered with a special grid of tiny dots containing positional information in the form of (x,y) coordinates. The pen contains a small camera which reads the dot pattern and identifies its position on the paper. Based on the pen's current position, information is fetched from the database and projected on the wall. The drawing together with all activated digital information becomes a new design which can be taken along in printed form.
The Exhibitions
- In spring 2005 the Monte Generoso was brought to Platzspitz in Zurich.
- In summer 2006 the project was exhibited in the Valle di Muggio.