Locast
How it works
Web
- Organize your visit according to your preferences
- Manage your itineraries, waypoints and videos
- Share with your social network
- Keep experiences and memory of your visit
Mobile
- Watch UGC and RAI media on-site
- Follow and create itineraries
- Navigate the city
- Create, publish geo-referenced media an share them
Wearable
- Wearable data visualization
- Find waypoints and related media
- Context-awareness with haptic feedback
- Keep an emotional link with Venice after the visit
Locast web provides a high bandwidth interface to the Locast system, using a rich AJAJ UI to provide efficient access to Locast's core features. Driving the website is the Locast back-end system. This server is designed around a core RESTful HTTP+JSON API, allowing both web and mobile clients to equally and efficiently access and manipulate all aspects of Locast.
A user creates an account on the site or uses Facebook Connect to link Locast to her Facebook account. Once her Locast account is created, she can install the Locast mobile application on her phone and enter the pairing code from the Locast website - allowing her to easily login and access her Locast account.
In order to provide rich interaction with Locast on a mobile device, a custom application was developed that lets users explore their environment and share their experiences using many of the mobile's advanced features. Using the mobile's GPS receiver and other location-sensing technologies, all recorded media (videos, notes, etc.) are geotagged when they are created while simultaneously recording the user's location trail. A user can then re-live their experiences by following their previous trails on the Locast website, watching their recorded videos.
To help stay out of the way, the mobile application has easily-switchable modes for different types of activities. By selecting a mode, the UI for the mobile application changes in subtle ways to reflect the given task. Recording a video is only a couple clicks and publishing it in realtime to the web/Facebook is a couple more. Emphasis is placed on getting tasks done quickly so the user can focus on their adventures.
Locast wearable is a mobile medium that provides visitors during their trip with alternative navigation experiences of Venice through its visual and haptic interfaces and functions like digital souvenir to keep an emotional link with their experiences in the city after their visit.
In the city, Locast wearable is designed to show real-time context-aware visualizations of the geo-referenced information streamed from the Locast mobile phone application over Bluetooth. Through its digital compass and sensors, it shows proximity and orientation information for places and their related media and allows the user navigate their desired itineraries with a haptic interface that provides tactile just-in-time reminders about places.
At home, the wearable becomes a permanent archive of the memory of the trip, where it displays photos and video clips collected through the different itineraries from the visit.
The wearable is conceived as a new application development platform to support and extend mobile phone services with additional hardware capabilities such as custom high-precision sensors, high pixel density OLED screen, connectivity protocols (e.g., Bluetooth, USB, Zigbee and RFID), tactile feedback and extended memory that can be customized for different applications.