Geolocated Media - I know where it's at!

I was recently at the HP Mediascape conference in Bristol, and wow, what a huge step geolocated media has taken these past few years. While it is still experimental, a bit clunky and semi-geeky (geek is cool ;) it is certainly a rapidly expanding medium. The conference featured case studies and presentations highlighting the immense potential for using this technology to enhance experiences of different environments and deliver content to an audience in a more dynamic and immersive way. From elements in alternative reality games to historical re-enactment tours around the Tower of London.

A Mediascape is a location-based experience, games and tours on a GPS handheld device. As you walk around a given area your GPS location triggers the playing of media in the application whether it be audio, images or video. As GPS devices become more widespread (how many people do you know with SatNav or a GPS mobile) this type of media becomes more justifiable for the big public service broadcasters to produce - they can reach more people. The British broadcasters already produce the best media in the world and this is yet another way in which our vast resources and archive can be re-packaged to reach a audience who might otherwise not receive this content -both at home and internationally.

HP have been developing this technology for a number of years and I remember Savannah which was created in associated with Futurelab and the BBC in Bristol. This was a strategy-based adventure game which allowed children to learn about life as a lion using their school playing field to mimic a Savannah, working together to hunt and survive. Read the Futurelab report here.

One I created earlier...NightlifeFor the nighttime challenge at the conference I, along with Mark Jacobs, Stuart Redding and Ed Drewitt, produced "Nighlife: World in a Square". We split Queens square, in Bristol, into four quarters, each representing a different continent. As you walk around the square you hear natural sounds from the nighttime of that continent - "can you guess where in the world you are?", walk a little further to see an image and hear a narration describing the natural sounds.

If Nightlife was an official geolocated experience connected to a public service production (channel4, BBC), we would need to include the capacity for the "immersee" to walk into any space, anywhere in the world, and unroll the experience around them, broadcasting not narrowcasting. And the Mscape software allows just that!

I found the Mscape creator software very intuitive and easy to work with, for the most part it is simply dragging and dropping onto a map. While you do need to understand the foundations of code to create more sophisticated experiences, anyone can get started with the basics. So download the toolkit and create a geolocated media guide around your garden. It may be a few years before the public service broadcasters can invest resources into producing such experiences for mass rollout but it is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
Paul Williams

A new age Viking Ship adventure

The timewatch website is following a Viking Ship expedition, with daily video, text and photos sent from the sea: www.bbc.co.uk/vikingship

They used a Thuraya DSL satellite system which, although geographically limited, worked pretty well and has the advantage of unlimited upload for a fixed fee.

Also see their interactive (google maps based) map on the external website. They did hope to incorporate this within the BBC site but the BBC testing procedures prevented this from happening on time.

Multiplatform stuff to consider when planning an expedition

Depending on the length and remoteness of your expedition I would suggest that the best way for your to proceed would be to have someone at base who you can upload packets of information to, using a sat uplink, as the year progresses. I'm actually looking into doing a similar sort of thing from the Arctic and Antarctic - even more logistically challenging, and using Iridium Modems and Begans to get the data across. Assemble your clips, text etc, in the field and uplink these packages in the evenings to base, who can then do the final posting, youtube uploading, Google File generating etc. They can also monitor comments from visitors to the site.

LONG WAY DOWN
You might want to check out Long Way Down, a Ewan McGreggor Project: www.bbc.co.uk/longwaydown and http://www.longwaydown.com/ to see how they did it. Which was similar to how you propose, They used 3G whilst in Europe but from most of Africa they uploaded to base with a Satlink.

I was at a talk about their project and they said the following: Web content/podcasts were "little moments of fun" mostly recorded on Mobile phone but also DV shot. 3G sent direct within Europe – Africa has no coverage, so satphone was used there. They sent in daily reports from the road - 115 clips in the 85 day expedition, 30-60 seconds each. Daily, or regular updates is very important to maintain an audience. They produced what is known as "Mashable content" allowing people to take bits away and embed on their own websites. Cycling websites etc and sites that were doing similar journeys. This allowed the word to spread about their project.

SUBSCRIBERS, PODCASTS & YOUTUBE
I would also set up an RSS feed so you can have subscribers to your blog and create a video/audio cast for iTunes. Youtube is an easy and free way to create a subscribable channel too. Photoblogs are very popular - using a service like Flickr or Panaramio, and along with Geotagging (see below) you could get the best out of these sites and see your photos on their map interfaces.

You might also want to consider tapping into the social network groups, namely Bebo, Myspace and Facebook - Bebo is about to break into the media market with the launch of a teen drama (Kate Modern)

I have written a quick guide on how to create a podcast here:

http://ironammonitetechnology.blogspot.com/2006/04/how-to-podcast-quick-guide.html

GEOTAGGING & GOOGLE EARTH
If you going to be travelling around much I would strongly urge to get into geotagging. We cannot underestimate how important this will be in the future, and how exciting it is at present. Ashley Highfield, director of BBC Future Media & Tech, said as much at the BBC Vision Multiplatform day.

Read my article about a little gadget that I use - cheap, easy and very effective. From this you can create a Geotrack which can be viewed on Google Earth (or any other global interface) as in the image below (you can also embed video and audio) - puts your media in a geographical context.

Also see why I think Geotagging is the next big thing.
And Geoblogging (put your blogs in a geographical context)

Not only does Geotagging put media and place together but it also allows you the capacity to leave "virtual graffiti" so people can access media about a location when they are at the location - using the power of Wifi or mobile internet. (see the mscapers project by HP).
Hope that helps,
Paul Williams

Geo-Blogs: Jane Goodall & Shackleton are doing it

Spice up your blog and turn it into a GeoBlog. Here's a couple of examples that I am fond of.

The Jane Goodall Institute has a Google Earth-based geoblog. This allows you to open the blog entries in their relevant location on Google Earth providing a geographical context to the writing.

The Shackleton Geoblog is another great example. This time taking a historic adventure and putting it in its geographical context, based on the diary entries and ship logs of Ernest Shackleton during the Endurance expedition.

More information on this geoblog can be read on the Google Earth Community page

Flickrvision & Twittervision

Twittervision and Flickrvision are projects that mashup their communities in real time with Google Maps. A 2-D or 3-D globe shows where people have just uploaded images to Flickr or have updated their Twitter status. Amazing and totally addictive.

Why Geo-tagged content is the NEXT BIG THING

A year ago I would have said that podcasting and blogging are the most significant developments on the web, with regards to public engagement and access - but technology evolves so fast that I now consider these to be “old school” and linear, the current fads are in social networking, global positioning and mashups. When geotagging is mixed with blogs, podcasts and facebook, we have a dynamic way of navigating content, our friends and media - spatially through Google Earth, which has revolutionised the way we view our planet.


When on location I have a little gadget which tracks my GPS coordinates as I go about my work. Back at base I can use this geotrack to geotag my media, view it on Google Earth and remotely share it with my friends over the web. Geotagging is the next big thing and it is how broadcasters and producers can extend the life of their content, making it more dynamic, more immersive and placing it in a global context – particular with regards to natural history and travel.

Audio trials have been carried out with GPS tagged narration to guide you through the streets of a city, and interactive games such as Pacmanhattan carried out on the streets of Washington, but this is just the beginning. As KML files become more common, and wifi networks and GPRS becomes more widespread, our TV and Radio audience will be able to access our geo-tagged content from the exact location in which it was captured, creating audio-visual location based experiences.

- Paul Williams

My New Gadget: Geo-Tagged Photography

I was so excited by a gadget that I recently bought that I wanted to let everyone know about it.
If your interested in the potential of using Geo-Tagged Photographs then please read on...

The gadget is a small GPS sync device (25pounds on ebay!) which allows me to geotag my photographs (taken on most digital cameras - I use a Cannon 350D) with GPS coordinates.

There are many other simple methods by which a photograph can be tagged (the longitude lattitude information entered into the images metadata) with the geographical location in which it was taken. You can even use your in-car GPS device to help you.

Navman have a range of in car navigation devices that include a digital camera. These generate geocoded photos that can be copied off the device, shared and used as navigation targets. Also see the NavPix Library a site for sharing geocoded photos: www.navman.com/navpix

Once they are tagged we can view photographs much more dynamically, and navigate them via maps online such as through mappr, or through an application like Google Earth. You can create and export a Google Earth KML file and share your photos and geo-tracks with other people using Google Earth.

See an excellent example from National Geographic where they represent features of the Zakouma National Park, such as elephant sitings or locations of camps.

Manually Geo-Tagging
(if you dont have a GPS device you can simply geo-tag your images using a combination of Picasa http://picasa.google.com/ and Google Earth. From within Picasa you can select to manually geo-tag your photographs by pin-pointing the location on the Google Earth globe (not that specific if your in some of the more uncharted and remote areas).


www.mappr.com. Current online photomaps are general and consist mostly of people’s random holiday snaps.

What cool things could I do with this...
There are many ways you could use Geo-tagging from help during production (i.e. revisiting exact locations) all the way through to new and interesting ways of delivering content to an audience. I've drafted a few of my ideas below, the best ones i'm keeping for future development, but I would encourage everyone to experiment with new gadgets and try doing more with GPS than just plotting your car journey.

- Paul Williams

We could build a user-generated photographic map of British Natural History. The interface would allow the user to filter the images he is interested in, peeling away layers of images, to show a a bird watchers photo map, a geological map, a habitat map... the list is endless and all created from User-Generated-Photographs.

Track an Adventure
* Create a GPS photo-diary of an adventure, more dynamic and exciting than a regular blog
* The exact route of an expedition or filming trip could be tracked and uploaded to the map.
* The audience can see the trail that the crew followed and the exact spot on earth where the crew took photographs. This can also be linked to daily diary entries and even video clips.

Geological Photo-Map
As a Geologist one of my first thoughts was to create a Geographically accurate Photographic Map of the Geology of Britain - to show people where the best sites are - a geo-accurate photographic field guide! Quite a step on from the original 19th Century William Smith Map.
This would tie in really well with an online field guide map (something iv'e already been working on by plotting my field visits on a Google Maps http://ironammonitepalaeontology.blogspot.com/)

Because geological exposures change very little the images on this map would correlate very well with what could be observed in the field.