Local Tourist Guide in a (Linux) Box

Andrew Sealey writes "Antenna Audio, the largest heritage and tourism interpretation company has just licensed a location-based media platform and associated linux portable media device from a UK company called Node to enable them to do some pretty cool stuff with traditional tourist attractions. People will hire the linux based device at their entry point and then as they walk around and explore the attraction the device will search huge archives of rich media video and audio dependent on who a user is, where they are and what they are looking at. Their top sites in the US are places such as Alcatraz, MoMA in New York and Elvis Presley Graceland's property and the rumour is that Elvis's property may be one of the first to be converted to this new technology."

Comments

Re:privacy

[Adrilla]

That sounds a bit more paranoid than I believe. I think it's a good idea, to allow guided tours without needing a human drag you around and bore you with sections of the tour you don't care about and allows you to linger on exhibits you like. Plus the venue could allow the tour to be in your native language which is a huge upside. Overall, I like the idea and I see it as having a lot of potential.

Re:Distraction?

[Adrilla]

If they use it correctly it could be great, imagine for one person looking at a painting it could be a 2 minute quick rundown of the painting and it's significance, and for someone else standing right next to that person it could be a one hour in depth bio of the artist, a demo of how the paint style is done, a video of the inspiration place of the painting, show work of the work of his mentor's and people who were inspired by the artist and then show you a realtime gps map of where to find their work in the same museum and on and on and on. It could be as much or as little as you want it to be, it all depends on how well the venue uses it.

Re:privacy

[jimmypw]

I don't share your concern. The worst that could happen is that they will gather statistical information on the most popular attractions and then think of ways to market those areas that are not as popular... better. It's the way of business, Supply and Demand.

ppl have to calm down after all not everyone is out to get you, some people genuinely want to make your life better. Except the govornment who tend to look after the other guy better.

The visitor's own PDA/phone for guided tours..?

[riflemann]

Having used those handset audio guided tour things, I can see that this is certainly a step up.

What would be even better would be to have some standard system whereby anyone with a wireless enabled PDA type device can walk into some attraction/theme park, and fire up their own PDA through which the audio/video can be viewed over some standard URL. Those rental things are often damaged or otherwise not working a lot of the time anyway.

The next step (or perhaps the first step) could even be a system where any mobile phone can be used as a guided tour handset. A combination of a micro-cell and custom phone system (Asterisk?) could achieve this.

Re:privacy

[Adrilla]

I'm not saying to fire the human guides, they're clearly better for group tours. I'm saying for the single person who may have a more vested interest on going solo, this could be the better solution. Let the person learn more about a particular artist, or art style, something more in depth than the tour guide who'll more than likely just glance over a section or not have to battle with 8 other people to get a question answered from a guide. It's all right there in the linux device. In fact, renting the devices might bring in revenue that would let them keep a few more people on staff. It doesn't have to be either or, remember all the gray that lies in between the black and white.

Oxymoron

[Anonymous Coward]

Isnt "local tourist" an oxymoron?